The Illuminatus! Trilogy

It was around eleven, and she had consumed perhaps a little too much Piper Heidseck, when she happened to find herself standing near a small group who were listening rapt-ly to a story the strange Celine was telling. Miss Portinari wondered what this creature might be saying-he was reputedly even more cynical and materialistic than other international money-grubbers, and Miss Portinari was, at that time, the kind of conservative Catholic idealist who finds capitalists even more dreadful than socialists. She idly tuned in on his words; he was talking English, but she understood that language adequately.

" 'Son, son,'" Hagbbard recited, " 'with two beautiful women throwing themselves at you, why are you sitting alone in your room jacking off?'"

Miss Portinari blushed furiously and drank some more champagne to conceal it. She hated the man already, knowing that she would surrender her virginity to him at the earliest opportunity; of such complexities are intellectual Catholic adolescents capable.

"And the boy replied," Hagbard went on, " 'I guess you just answered your own question, Ma.' "

There was a shocked silence.

"The case is quite typical," Hagbard added blandly, obviously finished. "Professor Freud recounts even more startling family dramas."

"I don't see…" a celebrated French auto racer began, frowning. Then he smiled. "Oh," he said, "was the boy an American?"

Miss Portinari left the group perhaps a bit too hurriedly (she felt a few eyes following her) and quickly refilled her champagne glass.

A half-hour later she was standing on the veranda, trying to clear her head in the night air, when a shadow moved near her and Celine appeared amid a cloud of cigar smoke.

"The moon has a fat jaw tonight," he said in Italian. "Looks like somebody punched her in the mouth."

"Are you a poet in addition to your other accomplishments?" she asked coolly. "That sounds as if it might be American verse."

He laughed- a clear peal, like a stallion whinnying. "Quite so," he said. "I just came from Rapallo, where I was talking to America's major poet of this century. How old are you?" he asked suddenly.

"Almost sixteen," she said fumbling the words.

"Almost fifteen," he corrected ungallantly.

"If it's any affair of yours-"

"It might be," he replied easily. "I need a girl your age for something I have in mind."

"I can imagine. Something foul."

He stepped further out of the shadows and closer. "Child," he said, "are you religious?"

"I suppose you regard that as old-fashioned," she replied, imagining his mouth on her breast and thinking of paintings of Mary nursing the Infant.

"At this point in history," he said simply, "it's the only thing that isn't old-fashioned. What was your birthdate? Never mind- you must be a Virgo."

"I am," she said. (His teeth would bite her nipple, but very gently. He would know enough to do that.) "But that is superstition, not religion."

"I wish I could draw a precise line between religion, superstition, and science." He smiled. "I find that they keep running together. You are Catholic, of course?" His persistence was maddening.

"I am too proud to believe an absurdity, and therefore I am not a Protestant," she replied- immediately fearing that he would recognize the plagiarism.

"What symbol means the most to you?" he asked, with the blandness of a prosecuting attorney setting a trap.

"The cross," she said quickly. She didn't want him to know the truth.

"No." He again corrected her ungallantly. "The Sacred Heart."

Then she knew he was of Satan's party.

"I must go," she said.

"Meditate further on the Sacred Heart," he said, his eyes blazing like a hypnotist's (a cornball gimmick, he was thinking privately, but it might work). "Meditate on it deeply, child. You will find in it the essential of Catholicism - and the essential of all other religion."

"I think you are mad," she responded, leaving the veranda with undignified haste.

But two weeks later, during her morning meditation, she suddenly understood the Sacred Heart. At lunchtime she disappeared-leaving behind a note to the Mother Superior of the convent school and another note for her parents- and went in search of Hagbard. She had even more potential than he realized, and (as elsewhere recorded) within two years he abdicated in her favor. They never became lovers.*

*They were quite good friends, though, and he did fuck her occasionally.

The importance of symbols- images- as the link between word and primordial energy demonstrates the unity between magick and yoga. Both magick and yoga- we reiterate-are methods of self-programming employing synchronistically connected chains of word, image, and bio-energy.