tales from the growth underground

I settled in for what I surmised would be an entertaining exchange. But as usual the details of my expectations were not met in the ways I imagined they might be.

Old Bill and Willard appeared to size each other up, like two weathered lions—one aged and decrepit but still commanding considerable power, the other some sort of rogue lion who had been scarred from fights that he never seemed to lose. And yet it was also clear that they had some sort of old and deep connection. These two clearly knew each other, in more than the conventional fashion.

My deliberations were interrupted by the sounds of their voices. Bill was saying something to Willard about what it took to avoid enemy fire. “You have to be like Kilgore in Apocalypse Now," he was saying, referring to Coppola’s movie about the Vietnam war that had come out just a few years before. “You need one of those weird lights around you.”

Willard was nodding his head, silently agreeing. Apparently another thing they had in common was that although they’d both witnessed battlefield atrocities and had both (out of necessity) killed people, neither of them had ever been hit by bullets or shrapnel. I had half-expected them to begin comparing bodily scars, like Robert Shaw’s “Quint” and Richard Dreyfuss’s “Hooper” in Jaws. But it turned out that their scars were mainly psychological.

“You had to be bright to stay out of the line of fire,” Bill was saying. At first I thought that he was using the word “bright” in the typical manner, to refer to intelligence. But it soon became evident that he meant something else. He was using the word to refer to the strength of one’s personal energy field. He referred to this energy as simply the “field”.

“A weak field makes you subject to the vampiric predations of humans,” he went on. “War is just a grossly exaggerated theatre for what is going on most of the time. And the main evils behind this are the organized religions and the politicians who are their puppets. Jesus is the Redeemer, the chief light of lights who came to get us out of this prison.”

Willard was listening politely to these somewhat mundane ramblings. Bill was old enough to be his grandfather, and Willard sort of treated him like that—deferred to him, absorbed his raw experience and wisdom, while probably retaining his own objections quietly.

As I was considering all this a bizarre thing began to unfold. It began when Bill suddenly became personal with Willard, and appeared to be passing on to him some very tailored teachings. To my frustration I couldn’t hear him clearly, as he had leaned toward Willard and lowered his voice. I decided to surreptitiously move closer, but to my shock I could not move my body. Something seemed to be gripping my arms and legs and effectively paralyzing me.

For a minute or so I found myself locked in place, while Bill continued murmuring to Willard. The sensation rapidly became uncomfortable. I decided that I had to say something. Just as I was about to speak, Bill stopped his murmuring and looked at me. I had the immediate sensation of something being released, and suddenly I had full movement again. The entire experience was profoundly eerie. Before I could ask about it Bill motioned me to come closer. I did so, sitting on the ground a few feet from him. He looked at me quizzically. I felt the space to speak and immediately questions began to pour out of me. I felt my mind working too fast, causing me to disconnect from the two of them.

Suddenly Bill looked over my left shoulder with a fierce expression on his face. He dark eyes seemed to grow even darker. At that moment I sensed an energy rippling down over my head. As it did so, my mind fell still. Struggle as I did, I could not generate a single thought. My mind was utterly blank.

I’m not sure how long this lasted for, as my experience of time also seemed to slow drastically. I felt my mind locked in some sort of power struggle with this force that Bill appeared to be directing or controlling. I attempted to speak out loud, but what came out of my mouth was gibberish—disconnected words and ideas. Then slowly I found my bearings and my thoughts seemed to become clearer. At that moment Bill looked away and the “energy” gripping my head disappeared.

Willard was looking on with an expression that seemed partly one of amusement, and partly one of respect. But I couldn’t tell if his respect was for Bill’s power, or my own tenacity in breaking free of Bill’s power.

I can’t recall much else of consequence happening that evening. We ended up in Bill’s living room with Georgia, drinking black coffee and chatting about the state of affairs in the world. Georgia, a middle-aged woman and lawyer with considerable life-experience, was going on about the declining spiritual state of the human race, and how despite all our technological advances we were actually entering a dark age. “The more technologically advanced we become,” she was saying, “the spiritually weaker we become.” This seemed like a simplified position to me but the more I thought about it the more I saw her point. Technology was enabling us to live easier lives, was doing the work for us, so to speak, and as a result we were less and less experiencing the strength that arises from having to make real efforts. In retrospect, her words were remarkably prescient.

On the drive back to the city, I asked Willard about the effects that had happened to me in Bill’s presence.

“Bill is an old and very powerful soul,” he was saying. “But what you experienced today was more the effects of one of his helpers. He has a strong familiar.”

“A what?” I asked. I had heard the term before, but usually only in conjunction with the stereotypical witch and her toad or black cat. Old Bill, a Bible-mystic, didn’t fit that stereotype. And yet he unquestionably could create impressive energy-effects.

“A spirit that he controls. He’s made pacts with things. He’s not what he appears to be.”

There was a certainty in Willard’s tone that gave me goose bumps. I was taken with the thought that Bill may have sent one of these “familiars” to keep track of me. For what purpose I couldn’t imagine. I asked if he had the capacity to do that.

Willard lit a cigarette, and I joined him. After a few drags from both of us the car was filling up with smoke. I thought about Cheech and Chong’s Up In Smoke scene, before rolling down the window. “Roll down your damned window,” I coughed. Willard silently complied. Then he replied to my question about “traveling familiars.”

“Bill is a magus. A real one, not one of those wannabe tricksters from a John Fowles or Herman Hesse novel. A real magus is one who commands power over elementals and other unseen forces. He can really make things happen, and yes, if he wants, he can spy on you from a distance.”

The idea was disturbing. “For what purpose?” I wondered out loud, not expecting any terribly convincing answer. Even I could discern the potential moral complexities of any sort of reason for watching someone from a distance.

“Remote viewing was a prized skill in older, pre-scientific revolution times,” Willard was saying. “You might want to keep track of someone for any number of reasons. In your case, if in fact Bill does something like that, it would be to monitor your spiritual progress. He’s interested in you. He sees your potential.” Willard shot me a glance with a half-smile that didn’t conceal the irony of the whole idea of Bill taking interest in me, a 23-year-old university student currently working in a bagel bakery.

“Interested in what?” I asked.

“He sees karmic seeds in the personal energy field, or aura, of a person. He’s able to look deeply into a given seed and recognize if it will germinate, at some point, into something positive or negative. In you, he sees some very strong seeds that can become something very good or very bad, depending on which way the winds blow for you.”

“And he told you all this?”

“Yes, right there in his study when you couldn’t move,” Willard laughed. “What else did you think he was talking about?”

The idea that Old Bill had really been passing on his observations about me, and not Willard, while “freezing” my body, somehow made the whole thing more intimidating.

"So he used one of these familiar-spirits to control my body and stop my mind?" I asked half-seriously, struggling to hold back my urge to blanket the whole real experience with skepticism.

"You felt it yourself. You know what I'm talking about," Willard answered with gravitas. Upon reflection, he was right. I was sure I could dismiss the whole thing as part of the power of suggestion that the subconscious can do so effectively. But try as I might, I could not deny the reality that I felt a damn presence around me exerting some sort of force on me. It was no fucking suggestion.

The rest of the drive back to the city was passed mainly in silence between us. Willard used to have CBC FM radio playing in his Chevy Nova, its staid programming always a bizarre contrast to his eccentric bohemian ways.

“Surprised you listen to that channel,” I remarked once.

“It settles my stomach,” he had replied.

I looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Your stomach?”

“Yes,” he said. “Like the Zen masters, I carry my mind in my stomach. My head I try to keep empty.”

Once back in the city, Willard stopped by St. Viateur’s bagel shop. For a guy who was working at rival Fairmount Bagel, this was sacrilege. But he had a penchant for doing these kinds of things, whatever might rub me on some fashion. He liked to “press corns” as Gurdjieff had called it.

While eating our bagels with lox and cream cheese in his car, I noticed a woman ambling in our direction. As she got closer, she moved toward Willard’s side of the car. She clearly knew him.

He greeted her effusively. He was always charming with the ladies, with the sole exception of a somewhat mysterious old spinster in his neighbourhood that he had some sort of running feud with. “Debbie!” he remarked warmly, “how are you?” She responded engagingly, and before I knew it, I had been relegated to the back seat while Willard schmoozed with her in the front. They went on and on, laughing and talking in an animated fashion about various matters. I was only listening absentmindedly, still caught up in the events at Bill's house.

“Fuck it,” I thought, as I began to eat my way through our haul. “The bagels are good.”

Chapter 6

That point in my life was an extraordinary confluence of characters and events, which at the time made me deeply question the whole notion of free will as the rapidity of these events, compressed into mere months, suggested a destiny that was written in the stars. Be that as it may, it did not stop me from attempting to take careful stock of these characters, why I was drawn to them (or more mysteriously, they to me), and what exactly they represented.

The bizarre nature of many of the experiences had served to shake up my preconceptions of the nature of reality. My primary interests up to then were not completely involving analytical and linear ways of conceiving, via hard science, namely my passions of physics and astronomy—after all, I was also invested in art and creative writing. But unquestionably the analytical thinking predominated. My absorption in chess as a committed tournament player only reinforced this type of strategic and tactical thinking.

The latter pastime had almost consumed me wholesale, the sheer addictive power of chess only known to those few hapless fools who truly cross the threshold over into the realm of the 64 squares, its mysterious geometry, and the dancing cast of royal characters that shuffle about on its battlefield. In the late 1970s I used to frequent one of the great chess cafes of North America, Montreal’s Café En Passant, on St. Denis street. This smoky den of iniquity, featuring men crammed shoulder to shoulder on rickety old tables strewn with scuffed Staunton pieces and misplaced plastic green and white chessboards, a cheerful but hopelessly under-worked server (chess players are inclined to forget to eat when absorbed in multiple consecutive games over many hours), and smoke everywhere, heightened the cultic quality of the whole thing. “En Passant” in French literally means “in passing,” and in this case, refers to a specific chess rule, but the name also applied in other subtle ways that probably went over the head of most who played there.

I had a chess mentor in my early months as a neophyte. His name was Denis, which, given that the club was situated on St. Denis street, seemed a charming coincidence. He was a young architect with multiple passions that including cycling and restoring old classic cars. In my first few months playing the local patzers and hustlers and club pros, I used to lose all the time. Then gradually I started to understand the game and improve. I started beating guys I’d previously lost to. My ego pride began to surge, but my real breakthrough came when I finally beat Denis, my mentor, after what must have been 100 consecutive losses to him.

I still remember the look on his face when he conceded defeat, a classic combination of competitive anger and pride at what his protégé had accomplished. “I’ve never seen anyone improve as fast as you,” he remarked, which I imagined was the perfect remark to make to both save face and to genuinely recognize his charge. I took the compliment in measure, because despite eventually going on to win the Quebec college championship in 1979, I never could make a dent against the few bona fide chess masters in Montreal at that time.  

Chess is a deeply humbling game, because no matter how good you get, you’re going to be beaten by someone better sooner or later. And no one can be good at chess without hundreds or thousands of hours of practice and study. You can’t sit down and play chess well with no previous experience of it anymore than you can sit down and play a violin well without ever having picked one up before. 

The chess subculture is very hierarchical, players ranked by a rating system that assigns a number that will fluctuate, depending on tournament results. The weaker players—beginners or those with obvious lack of ability—were known as “fish”. The strongest players were the “masters,” of which there were very few. Between the fish and the masters was a vast range of skill, everything from the standard club player to Class A players to candidate masters.

Above the masters was the even more rarefied air of the “international masters” (IMs). A standard chess club like the Café En Passant might have one or two IMs present playing casual games at any give time. Beyond the IMs were the “grandmasters”. At the time I was frequenting the En Passant there might have been a couple of hundred grandmasters in the entire world out of millions of players, most of them concentrated in Europe and Russia. Canada had two, Duncan Suttles and Peter Biyiasis. Suttles was a recluse living in Vancouver, but Biyiasis was in Montreal at the time and on rare occasions would be present at the club. The table he played at would always attract a crowd, as he casually dismantled his opponent, and then explained after, in his faint Greek accent with a slightly aristocratic bearing, how he’d accomplished the deed. I don’t recall him losing a single game. Like many of the chess elite, he was something of a snob. He used to wax poetic about his games for the grubby contingent surrounding his table. “Ah, zees was one of my finest games!” he would regularly pronounce, then showing us in his detailed analysis, replaying the entire game from memory, why his opponent had been a fool.

Biyiasis had been Canadian champion in the early ‘70s, but his big claim to fame had been the fact that he was a major training partner for the infamous Bobby Fischer, the Soviet-slayer, who many regard as the greatest chess player of all time, his later descent into madness notwithstanding.

I once invited Willard to accompany me to the club for a visit. To my surprise he agreed. Turns out he had played the game before and had some basic skills. While at the club he played only one game, defeating one of the club players who was average at best in strength. Willard declined to play more. I wondered whether his ego wanted to escape after his one victory—get out while ahead kind of thing—but he later denied it. He said it was time to leave because of the general atmosphere.

“These guys are mainly neurotics, introverts flirting with madness, playing out unfinished psychological issues via their addiction to a game that largely replicates family patterns.”

I frowned at him, although his assessment didn’t entirely surprise me.

“Have you read Alexander Cockburn’s Chess and The Dance of Death?” he asked.

I hadn’t. Though if Willard mentioned it, I figured I now would.

“Cockburn presented a somewhat dim, Freudian interpretation of chess, the gist of which is that the king symbolizes the father, and the queen the mother, and that chess players are all acting out castration anxiety—the fear that their father is going to take away their manhood, as represented by the king, via checkmating him. With, of course, the aid of the mother, the queen.”

He looked wryly at me, waiting for me to respond. My frown deepened, which he seemed to find amusing.

“And remember Crowley,” he continued, with a look of satisfaction as if he was now playing a trump card that I’d find hard to refute. “He was an obsessive chess player in his youth, got to be near-master strength, thought about dedicating his life to the game. And then he had his big awakening when he walked into his chess club one day and realized with full force that it was not an option for him to spend his life consorting with such fools. I think his line was, ‘there but for the grace of God, went I, Aleister Crowley.’”

I could see the point. Any obsessive pursuit of a pastime, a game, would be bound to unbalance a person. Sensing all this I played in one last tournament, the ridiculously named Santa Claus Open, and then resolved to quit. Doubtless my sub-par performance didn’t hurt my decision. Nothing like losing to provide justification for change. 

Not long after I wrote a short story called The Black Knight. It was my attempt to write something Kafka-esque, like the great Czech’s Metamorphosis. My story was all about a man who wakes up one day and realizes that he’s been transformed into a chess piece—a large wooden black knight. Although he is just a piece of wood, he has eyes of a sort, and can see. He finds himself in an empty room save for a large chessboard that he sits upon, and directly in front of him, a large oval ornate mirror. He is now destined to spend all of eternity gazing at himself in the mirror, unable to move. From there he goes into a prolonged reverie, living out what seems to be memories of some ancient past.

Willard listened to the story as I read it out to him. He seemed unimpressed. “You need to have more sex,” he murmured, lighting up a cigarette.

I could follow his reasoning. To exist as a chess piece in an empty room was one step above Dante’s ninth circle of Hell, where everything is frozen and motionless. Sex was a fluid act, a dance of interconnection between two water-beings.

I shared that thought with Willard. He smiled faintly. “Not bad,” he replied. “That can make up your next short story. Dance of the water-beings beats dance of death by far. Or stories about chess pieces sitting in front of a mirror like some frozen cock.”

He looked piercingly at me. The image drove the point home. Willard had spoken at length to me about sex and its role in the work of transformation. He had introduced me to the ideas of circulating energy up and down the spine, containing sexual release, controlling the ability to ejaculate only when one wants, or not at all in order to satisfy the woman, whose “inner Kali” then had a better chance to surface for the benefit of both, and all that Tantric blather that Western seekers were gobbling up at that time. But in all these conversations I could never discern whether he was operating from a higher plane of understanding, or whether he was secretly driven by his own dark impulses and disguising it all in the language of a sage.

I never really formed a conclusion on that, as I recognized that my relative youth disqualified me from fully understanding a man almost twice my age with twice my life-experience. I did however trust my basic instincts, and they informed me that Willard’s intentions were benign, even though he clearly still had his demons.

These demons used to emerge when he drank beyond a certain point. One night I was sitting alone in my apartment reading when there was a knock on my door. I opened it, and there stood Willard, bottle of red wine in hand. On occasions like that he wouldn’t bother to acknowledge whether I wanted to receive his company. He’d usually just barge right in.

He headed to my kitchen, grabbed two glasses, opened the bottle, and poured. Then he drank his glass without interruption. He looked at me. I was half-expecting some monologue about the great work of ego-loss, when he surprised me and took a different direction.

“Juan wants to have sex with me,” he said. “What do you think I should do?”

I couldn’t tell whether he was genuinely seeking my counsel, or whether he was speaking rhetorically as a means of provoking me into something.

“What do you want to do?” I ventured, figuring such a bland question would camouflage my bewilderment. I had assumed that Willard was pretty straight, based on his extensive experience with women, and the fact that I’d never seen him betray the slightest sexual interest in men.

He lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and blew the smoke toward the kitchen window instead of into my face. This was sign that he was thinking differently.

“Some of the deepest occult initiations involve anal penetration,” he said, with a suddenness that caught me off guard. He laughed at my surprise.

“The point is all about transgression,” he went on. “The boundaries of the ego are problematic when it comes to rising on the Tree of Life. Different avenues sometimes need to be pursued to get past the various guardians that block the way forward. Old Crow himself made references to these guardians when he wrote about the need to find other methods to ‘roll away the stone’ in his monogram on hashish.”

“Guardians?” I asked. He hadn’t used the term before.

“Yes, guardians. These are the Archons that some schools of Gnostics talk about. Their job is to slow you down, cause problems, fuck with your mind, manipulate you, test you with bad luck, and so forth. That’s what Satan was up to with Job in the Old Testament.”

“What does getting fucked up the ass have to do with any of this?”

He grunted. “The association is not immediately obvious, granted. Are you familiar with the Osculum Infame?”

“The Osculum what?”

He smiled and downed another glass of wine. “Osculum Infame,” he repeated slowly, as if savouring the words. “It’s Latin for ‘kiss of shame’. In the Middle Ages it was believed that witches attended sabbaths at night in a deserted spot, like a forest or a grove, where they consorted and fornicated with the Devil. One of their most basic ritual acts was believed to be the kiss of shame, where the Devil bends over and the witches each take their turn kissing his ass.”

I was about to make some quip about pornography, when I had a flicker of recognition. I remembered seeing an old woodcut from a Renaissance book about witch persecutions that seemed to be connected to what he was talking about. I shared my thought with him.

“Yes,” he said. “The image you speak of is from the 15^th century Malleus Maleficarum, or ‘Hammer of Witches’ as it was rather ironically translated. It was written by that maniac German monk Kramer. The book is full of weird psychosexual pathology projected onto so-called witches. Nevertheless, it does present a fascinating window into the word-view of western Europe at that time.”

“Why do you say so-called witches?”

“Because 95% of them weren’t. They were Christians in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“This kiss of shame,” I ventured. “Might it not be a projection of the repressed homosexuality of the priesthoods?”

Willard smiled approvingly at me. “Very good, you’re starting to connect dots.”

“Connecting dots” was one of his favourite expressions, something he maintained that a true mystic was inclined to start doing more of, once their more sensitive faculties of discernment started to come online. I’m not sure my limited time spent with him qualified me for some sort of “increasing discernment” abilities, but something seemed to be rubbing off, despite his quirks. Or so I chose to believe.

“Yes, many of the monks became gay, you could say, over the prolonged periods of time in which their only company was other men. During the Dark Ages the monkhoods were the custodians of the so-called books of the sorcerers that had survived since the time of Christ. That queer Pope Sylvester of the 10^th century was suspected of conjuring demons. The combination of homosexuality and having access to the secrets of the Devil made for some interesting results,” he laughed.

I sipped my wine. The taste was acrid. I disliked cheap wine, which seemed to be the only kind Willard ever bought. It wasn’t because he was poor. I’d heard rumours from Juan that Willard was quite well off, though he lived in a modest bungalow and drove an old car. He once told me he just preferred cheap wine. “No such thing as good tasting wine,” he had proclaimed. “It all tastes like soap or vinegar. Bordeaux, Burgundy, Pinot Noire—whatthefuckever. People brainwash themselves into thinking there is such a thing as great wine. There is cheap wine and expensive wine, but it’s all just soap and vinegar.”

“Then why drink it?” I’d asked.

“It’s good for the spirit,” he replied. “We humans have been drinking putrid grapes for almost 10,000 years. There’s a reason for that. It’s part of the sacrament in many traditions, not just Christian. Take Omar Khayyam, the 12^th century Persian poet. Much of his Rubaiyat, the work translated by Fitzgerald, is him raving on and on about the spiritual value of wine.”

This comment interested me for other reasons. And Willard, who usually had an angle on something, had a pointed reason for sharing it with me. I was to find out, not long after, that he belonged to what he characterized as a “secret society” that went by the name “Ruby Yacht”.

“What is that, the gay mariner’s version of the Pequod?” I joked.

My quips to him often fell flat, but that one made him chuckle. “Not quite,” he replied. “Ruby Yacht is a play on Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. And no, it’s not a secret branch of AA either.”

He went on to tell me a bit about the society, and how it was comprised of a somewhat mysterious group of people scattered around the world who were part of what he characterized as an “underground” dedicated to studying the secret history and likely future destiny of the human race. Much of this study involved considerable sleuthing and travel to what he termed ‘power spots’.

“How many people are in the group?” I asked, half-expecting him to say himself and a few other societal outliers. His reply surprised me.

“It varies, but there is a committed core of around forty men and women. Some of the members are what would charitably be called eccentrics, but all are intelligent, dedicated, and capable of critical thinking—and some even have legitimate connections with people in power positions in the world. They range in professions from psychotherapists, teachers, lawyers, geologists, wealthy recluses, occultists, and computer engineers. And then we have our more extended associates, various contacts we have in historically important countries such as Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Greece, England, Tibet, and so forth.”

I looked at him holding a question in my mind, which he clearly read.

“You’re wondering about my involvement with the society,” he said. “Let’s just say that I have the Midas touch. I’ve been something of a benefactor to some members in the group. And I wear other hats as well, many of which you as of yet know nothing of.”

He had finished the sentence with an air of completion. It was evident he’d be saying no more about the topic for now. I looked at him quizzically.

“Everything in its own time,” he said. “So far you’ve gotten exactly as much as you can assimilate. Next week I’ll introduce you to a local member of the Ruby Yacht.”

Chapter 7

I knew a bit about secret societies at that point in my life, as I’d been inspired to read up on them after ploughing my way through most of Herman Hesse’s novels, especially Demian and Steppenwolf. It was the latter story, written by Hesse in the late 1920s, that would prove to be weirdly prescient as applied to my experiences with the Ruby Yacht.

Steppenwolf was all about a man who has to deal with the standard twin forces within every human, the exalted higher nature, and the lower bestial nature. It was the latter that Hesse had likened to a wolf of the steppes. In the novel the protagonist, Harry Haller, eventually is directed to a “Magic Theatre” where he encounters certain key characters who guide him into a deeper understanding of his nature.

Willard had arranged a coffee meet with he and I and a middle-aged woman named Barbara. He had mentioned her to me before, and about some of the work he had done with her and her husband Peter. They lived in a rural home somewhere between Montreal and Toronto, where they worked as Primal Therapists. Willard claimed that they were two of the “deepest people” that I would ever get to meet, and that their inner work with their students was not for everyone. He had also told me that they were long-standing members of the Ruby Yacht.

I decided to do my best to keep an open mind going into the meeting, as at that point I was becoming increasingly aware of the division within me of how I perceived and judged Willard. I had concluded that he was a genuine article in many ways, and clearly had access to knowledge and experience and people far outside normative life. On the other and, I could never quite shake a feeling of a certain unease around him, as it often felt as if he was reaching for something with me that I was not sure I could, or even wanted, to provide. Or perhaps I just felt unworthy of his attention. Nonetheless, I decided to lean toward good will in meeting people that he wanted me to meet, as there was always the possibility that they would present something of even greater quality than what Willard appeared to be offering.

Meeting Barbara, that instinct was confirmed. I immediately felt at ease around her, in a way that I rarely did with Willard, and moreover, I felt her power, a power that seemed to emanate from her in a natural fashion shaped by years of hard-earned wisdom.

Barbara was in her late 50s, with a pleasant, round face and an easy smile. At first glance she might have passed for the neighbourhood librarian. What marked her apart however were her eyes. They were light grey and had a depth and a fixed quality to them that suggested a lively intelligence and someone who could truly pay attention and understand another person beyond the usual superficial acknowledgements. She also spoke with a clarity and gentle conviction that added to the quality of self-confidence that she emitted.

While the three of us sat around a table in the café, the discussion somehow became steered to the topic of ceremonial magic. It was an area of esoteric work that I was only marginally familiar with on a theoretical level. I had my copy of Crowley’s classic Magic in Theory and Practice, though much of it went over my head.

Barbara was talking about the role of the Holy Guardian Angel in ceremonial magic, or the “Angel” or “higher self” as it was variously called, and how it was something difficult to access for a seeker who had not gone through what she called their “primal issues” first. I pressed her on what she meant by “primal issues.”

“The greatest trauma in life is generally the birth process,” she said. “It is the great barrier to cross, and for the incoming soul is both exhilarating and terrifying. It is also where our primary patterns that we will face in our life take root. For example, if your parents were ambivalent about having you, or even if the attending doctors and nurses were carrying negativity, the infant absorbs all that to some degree, leading to direct imprinting about how safe the world is, how safe it is to be alive, is one supported in life, and so forth. And in most situations, especially in the industrialized West, such negative imprinting via birth is common.”

She paused, to take measure of how I was receiving her words. This was a quality that to me immediately marked her as a developed person. So many people talk at a person, rather than being sensitized to the reality of the person in front of them. That said, Barbara was no caretaker. She also had a blunt manner to her that suggested to me that she would exercise empathy only to a point and would abandon it if it was clear that the person she spoke to misused it in even the slightest.

She spoke with Willard for a bit, and I watched closely the interaction between the two. Although it was evident that Barbara had been some kind of mentor of Willard’s in the past, it was also clear that this was not going to be openly acknowledged, that the two had some sort of unspoken agreement that Willard was now entirely a free agent and accordingly, the two related more as friends and equals. It was only later that I discovered that Willard had studied under Barbara and her husband Peter more than a decade ago. It was also clear that Barbara was both fond of Willard and at the same time, seemed content to keep him at arm’s length. Most people operated that way around him.

Barbara and Willard were on the same page about how the Primal Therapy process that she facilitated with her husband Peter would be beneficial for me. I trusted the guidance and didn’t feel for a moment that I was being merely enrolled into something.

That’s not to suggest that Barbara wasn’t also a businesswoman. She was, and her Primal Therapy process wasn’t cheap. It involved a ten-day retreat in a large, isolated room in their country house. The fee was $1,100, which in the early 1980s was not a pittance. But after having dinner with her and Peter, I decide to go for it. Over the dinner I felt myself connecting with even greater ease with Peter, who was earthier and more emotionally-based than Barbara. It was decided after the dinner that Peter would be my facilitator for the ten-day isolation. The structure was simple: for ten days I’d be on my own in a large self-contained wing of their house. For five hours each day, Peter would come in and work with me. The other 19 hours were in isolation.

The retreat turned out to be far more intense than I’d anticipated. Peter used a special bench that he called “the horse” that he had me lie on, my back arched so as to expose my belly and solar plexus area. He would then work on me by guiding me through certain breathing exercises while he pressed his fingers into particular spots around my belly. The result was impressive. I found myself moving into various altered states of consciousness while what seemed to be very old memories and patterns locked into the muscular armouring of my body were released. Some of these old patterns were extremely painful, resulting in great physical pain as Peter worked on me. He would claim, later, that he rarely touched me with any significant force. I felt pain only because of what was locked into my body-armour.

Peter taped all my sessions, and at the end, simply handed all the tapes to me, telling me that they were mine. Back home a few days after the ten days was over, I gingerly placed one of the tapes into my tape recorder and listened, not quite sure what to expect. I was freaked out by what I heard—grunting, growling, positively demonic sounds in what seemed to perfectly constitute an exorcism—and all of the sounds coming from me.  

I told Willard about this later and he laughed loudly. I also told him that at one point during the isolation, Peter’s steel blue eyes evoked the imagery of a Nazi. This made Willard laugh even more.

“That’s great,” he casually remarked. “You should tell Peter that he has Nazi eyes.”

He was obviously hugely amused. Apparently he had been a witness to Peter’s shadow side before.

“Nazis aside,” he added more seriously, his eyes taking on a wistful look, “that man is a treasure. Few are as skillful as he is at evoking old patterns concealed inside your mind. People like him and Barbara are rarely well-known, which is a tragedy. This world glorifies fools, and ignores its gems.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because of fear. People are terrified of deep truths. Such as the fact they are full of pain and spend their lives concealing it.”

I then recalled that at one point in my deep work with Peter, while accessing some of the pain Willard was referring to, I had called out “there’s only pain! Nothing is real but this fucking pain!”

In response Peter had looked at me with a mix of approval and deep compassion. “Yes, you’re absolutely right,” he said, in his slow, deep voice. “Only the pain is real.”

I soon came to understand that he wasn’t implying that in the strict literal sense. Obviously there is more to life than pain. But he was my guide into the netherworlds, the chthonic, the depths of my own unconscious, and to be a skillful guide, he had to be unwavering and unflinching in his resolve to not allow my defences to deny the pain inside of me in the slightest fashion. Even the smallest amount of deflection or denial or minimizing would be enough to “bar the gates” and prevent me from truly accessing and integrating what lay within.

The Primal Therapy work with Peter and Barbara also opened the doors of perception for me to truly begin to understand Dante’s great masterpiece Divine Comedy, which I had been semi-obsessed with at that time, and its three volumes of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Doing my own shadow work made it obvious why the great medieval Italian poet had started with Hell first, and why the Buddha had declared that his “first Noble Truth” was that life was suffering. There can be no legitimate waking up without first facing into the darker zones within. Anything else amounted to some kind of pie-in-the-sky world-view that always ended up where fairy tales end up, being smashed by something.

A week or so later Willard invited me to attend what he called a “lodge gathering” of the Ruby Yacht. I was told that about a dozen or so members would be there. I asked him what to expect.

“High magic,” he answered. “Men and women in robes doing all kinds of strange shit. You won’t be bored,” he winked. “But you might be disturbed. That’s fine. Just don’t believe what the disturbance is telling you.”

Chapter 8

Although I wasn’t sure what to expect attending the lodge meeting of the Ruby Yacht, I was not without some vague presumptions about such meetings. I had, after all, read some of the pioneers of the 1970s-80s revival of Western magic such as Francis King and Israel Regardie and Kenneth Grant. But none of this theory was to prepare me for the atmosphere of the gathering.

The location was the old Masonic building at the foot of Mt. Royal, the hill in the centre of the city, sometimes (wrongly) referred to as an “extinct volcano”. I used to hang out at the top of Mt. Royal at night on numerous occasions, drawn by its 100-foot-high cross, lit at night in white, about 10 per cent of its bulbs shattered by vandals, the entire cross a gaping monument to the city’s Catholic imprint. Perhaps unsurprisingly Willard didn’t care for it, dismissing it as a garish eye-sore. I felt differently. To me the thing had a distinct presence and echoed the history of the city in a way that gave it cultural roots. Or something like that.

I attended my first meeting on a chilly evening in November, in which a few snowflakes meandered down from the sky in aimless patterns. It occurred to me that I might feel some kinship with these snowflakes, heading in a general direction, but lacking aim, guided only by some inexorable force that was drawing me somewhere, to some sort of common ground with some tribe of people that I had, in the main, yet to meet.  

My first surprise in entering the foyer of the Hall were the people of the group, a few of whom extended a cordial greeting to me. Most seemed to be European, several with Slavic accents. A smattering of English and French Quebecois were mixed in. After some preliminary social exchanges and small talk, the members retired to the large washrooms to don their ritual garments. Most emerged wearing black robes and what seemed to be black or silver opera masks. All then filed into the main room, which was large and laid out in a pattern that was foreign to me. I really didn’t know what I was looking at, which enhanced the impressiveness of the experience. Candles burned on tall sticks and incense was lit. I was ushered to an upper deck, afforded a wide view of the events. There was one other guest, a woman a bit older than me who sat by my side. The room was dark and we only marginally acknowledged each other.

For the next hour or so I witnessed a number of complex rituals, performed both solo by some, and in group formation by everyone together. The rituals involved the tracing of geometric symbols—the pentagram being an easy one for me to identify—and the intonation of strange sounds in some languages I recognized, others I didn’t. There was a clear leader, a man in ceremonial garb different from the others. His robe was dark red and so was his mask. Two females flanked him, both in white wearing gold masks. All others were in black. In the dim light I recognized Willard as one of the members in black, as well as Barbara and Peter.

After the structured rituals were finished the strangest part of the evening then unfolded. Ethereal music began playing and all the members entered into a spontaneous, unstructured dance with each other. It was a bizarre contrast to the formal rituals that had preceded it. While chaotic, the dancing also had a mesmerizing coherence to it, showing that most of the members had a strong relationship with their bodies—and, it should be added, with each other—and were mindful of their movements. I say “most”, because one or two the members robed in black appeared somewhat stiff; they hovered on the periphery of the group, presumably neophytes or probationers.   

Throughout all of this I noticed something similar to what I had experienced with Willard the night that he conjured the spirit Agares, while the strange man and his dog had been hanging around outside his house. In both cases my consciousness seemed to be altered in a noticeable fashion, resulting in an odd perception of time that featured selective memory lapses. It was as if the rituals influenced the atmosphere of the space, something like a shroud or a fog that was in effect opening a veil between this world and some other. My lapses in memory and my altered perception of the flow of time seemed to be reflecting my resistance to fully entering into the ritual space and the concurrent state of mind it invited.  

Later that night I sat with Willard in a café and shared my thoughts with him. He nodded in agreement. “Yes,” he said, “that’s by and large a correct interpretation. Ceremonial magic is all about affecting consciousness in such a fashion that it makes it possible to escape from the mass-consensus brainwashed state that the vast majority of people dwell in."

“How is that different from organized religion?” I asked.

“In some ways it isn’t,” he replied. “I have an associate who is an Anglican priest. I’ve taught him the core rituals of the Golden Dawn. He’s even had lucid dreams where he finds himself performing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. And I’ve attended his Christmas eve midnight masses. The Christian mass is purely high magic. They’ve just deluded themselves into believing that they have sole right of way to the divine.”

The “Golden Dawn” was a reference to the English occult society founded in the late 19^th century. It lasted for about a decade before collapsing under the weight of power struggles and scandals brought about largely by poor interpersonal skills and failure to do psychological shadow work. These were all matters I came to understand over time, but back then I was still caught up in the specialness trap, believing that practitioners of the esoteric should somehow be above petty ego squabbles.

Willard laughed at my deliberations. “Not so,” he said. “Esoteric or occult types can be some of the most mixed-up people, acting out unfinished childhood business while prancing around in robes repeating words that might as well be Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola.”

He emphasized the name of the soft drink in such a fashion that made me laugh. It was moments like these that made me appreciate Willard’s cynical humor. For all that might be said about him, he was not naïve.

I asked him if there was any significance to the colors of the robes.

“Yes,” he answered without hesitation. “The three main colors of black, white, and red are the three pillars of alchemy, generally known by their Latin names nigredo, albedo, rubedo. In the laboratories of the old alchemists these three colors generally described the three resultant physical stages of heating a material in a container of some sort. The application of heat is the key element to the process of psychospiritual development, where heat represents conscious intent and what Gurdjieff called ‘voluntary suffering’—that is, suffering in the service of waking up."

I was straining to listen, in part because my consciousness was still experiencing the aftereffects of the ceremony. But I was interested in this confluence of magic and alchemy, which at that time I knew little about apart from the stereotypical Renaissance alchemist who blows himself up in his lab trying to produce gold for some impatient king.

“The informal name of the group is the Ruby Yacht,” Willard went on. “But the secret name is ‘The Magic Theatre’, as inspired by Hesse's Steppenwolf. That relates more to the spontaneous dance you witnessed at the end. There was much more going on there than you were able to perceive.”

“Such as what?” I asked, now genuinely curious. As powerful and mesmerizing as the rituals were, it was the spontaneous dance at the end that caught my attention the most. 

Willard didn’t answer. He’d become distracted by some commotion outside the coffee shop. A drunk man had fallen down and was flailing about on the sidewalk. People walked past and avoided him, as he was both large and loud and seemed potentially dangerous. Willard got up and headed outside. I followed. He squatted beside the man, who was delirious and raving on about something. Willard placed his hand on the man’s chest and seemed to transmit some energy to him. I could have sworn I vaguely detected a subtle golden light extending from Willard’s hand. Perhaps it was just the reflection of the bright neon lights of the restaurant. Regardless of what was going on, one impression formed vividly in my mind: Willard back in the trenches of Vietnam, attending to a fallen comrade. 

After a few seconds the man calmed down. Willard asked him some questions, the man answered, and then Willard hailed a cab and took the man home. I returned to the coffee shop and finished my raisin pie. It then occurred to me that Willard was alchemy himself, a blend of better and worse angels.  

(To be continued).