The Illuminatus! Trilogy

They rented a villa in Naples to begin the transformation. For a month the only humans she saw- aside from Hagbard- were two servants named Sade and Masoch (she later learned that their real names were Eichmann and Calley). They began each day by serving her breakfast and quarreling. The first day, Sade argued for materialism and Masoch for idealism; the second day, Sade expounded fascism and Masoch communism; the third day, Sade insisted on cracking eggs from the big end and Masoch was equally vehement about the little end. All the debates were on a high and lofty intellectual level, verbally, but seemed absurd because of the simple fact that Sade and Masoch always wore clown suits. The fourth day, they argued for and against abortion; the fifth day, for and against mercy-killing; the sixth day, for and against the proposition "Life is worth living." She became more and more aware of the time and money Hagbard had spent in training and preparing them: Each argued with the skill of a first-rate trial lawyer and had a phalanx of carefully researched facts to support his position- and yet the clown suits made it hard to take either of them seriously. The seventh morning, they argued theism versus atheism; the eighth morning, the individual versus the State; the ninth, whether wearing shoes was or was not a sexual perversion. All arguments began to seem equally insubstantial. The tenth morning, they feuded over realism versus antinomianism; the eleventh, whether the statement "All statements are relative" is or is not self-contradictory; the twelfth, whether a man who sacrifices his life for his country is or is not insane: the fifteenth, whether spaghetti or Dante had had the greater influence on the Italian national character…

But that was only the start of the day. After breakfast in her bedroom, where every article of furniture was gold but only vaguely rounded) she went to Hagbard's study (where everything looked exactly like a golden apple) and watched documentary films concerning the early matriarchal stage of Greek culture. At ten random intervals the name "Eris" would be called; if she remembered to respond, a chocolate candy arrived from a wall shoot. At ten other random intervals, her own name was called; if she responded to this, she received a mild electric shock. After the tenth day the system was changed and intensified: The shock was stronger if she responded to her previous name, whereas if she responded to "Eris" Hagbard immediately entered and balled her.

During lunch (which always ended with golden apfel-strudel), Galley and Eichmann danced for her, a complex ballet which Hagbard called "Hodge-Podge"; as many times as she saw this, she never was able to determine how they changed costumes at the climax, in which Hodge became Podge and Podge became Hodge.

In the afternoon Hagbard came to her suite and gave lessons in yoga, concentrating on pranayama, with some training in asana. "The important thing is not being able to stand so still that you can balance a saucer of sulphuric acid on your head without getting hurt," he stressed. "The important thing is knowing what each muscle is doing, if it must be doing something."

In the evenings they went to a small chapel that had been part of the villa for centuries. Hagbard had removed all Christian decorations and redesigned it in classical Greek with a traditional magic pentagram on the floor. She sat, in the full lotus, within the internal pentagon, while Hagbard danced insanely around the five points (he was totally stoned), calling upon Eris.

"Some of what you're doing seems scientific," she told him after five days, "but some is plain damnfoolishness." "If the science fails," he replied, "the damnfoolishness may work."

"But last night you had me in that pentagon for three hours while you called on Eris. And she didn't come."

"She will," Hagbard said darkly. "Before the month is over. We're just establishing the foundation this week, laying down the proper lines of word and image and emotional energy."

During the second week she was convinced Hagbard was quite mad as she watched him prance and caper like a goat around the five points, shouting, in the flickering candlelight and amid the heavy bouquet of burning incense and hemp. But at the end of that week she was responding to her former name exactly 0 percent of the time and responding to "Eris" exactly 100 percent of the time. "The conditioning is working better than the magic," she said on the fifteenth day.

"Do you really think there's a difference?" he asked curiously.

That night she felt the air in the chapel change in a strange way during his dancing invocations.

"Something's happening," she said involuntarily- but he replied only "Quiet," and continued, more loudly and insanely, to call upon Eris. The phenomenon- the tingle- remained, but nothing else happened.

"What was it?" she asked later.