The Matrix Read Free Page B

sufficient to hold my own in conversations, to formulate my first, faltering questions, to grasp, with some effort, the answers I might be given. I made my first contact with some of the city’s esoteric groups, restricting myself to the more popular and mainstream among them.
    I reasoned – and was in due course proved correct – that direct contact with magical or Satanic groups might be difficult to establish. These were people who either had something to hide or fancied they did – they would not rush out of the shadows to be interviewed by the first passer-by. But I had read enough about the occult underworld to know that groups shaded into one another, as did beliefs and practices. Those who practised magic or demonism today had in all likelihood started out attending meetings of much milder associations, with Subud or Theosophy or Rosicrucianism, or one of the circles devoted to the teachings of Ouspensky or Gurdjieff.
    A sociologist is not a journalist and cannot afford to work like one. Where the journalist can write a prize-winning article on the basis of a single visit or half a dozen interviews, and is free to offend or misrepresent since he need never return again, the sociologist needs to tread warily. He may have to spend months gradually getting to know the people whose behaviour and beliefs he is researching, winning their confidence, discarding first impressions, inspiring revelations of their deeper feelings and convictions. It is delicate work, calling for human understanding as much as scientific detachment.
    So it was that most evenings found me in damp, ill-heated rooms or rented halls, listening to talks on Atlantis, the Himalayan Masters, Hermetic lore, or alchemy. The speakers were surprisingly varied. Many belonged to an earlier generation, itself the heir of late Victorian occultism. Intense, shabby or a little overdressed, their speech full of archaisms, they presided over gatherings of the long-term faithful. Dust filled the rooms in which they spoke, old rooms lined with shelves of arcane books with unreadable titles. I would pass into a half-sleep as their voices droned on about astral bodies or the lost continent of Lemuria.
    Others were much younger, a new generation of enthusiasts, more interested in morphic resonance or corn circles than the tired fantasies of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant. It was among them, I thought, that I would make my first contacts with the people I most wanted to meet. I listened carefully, biding my time, gaining their trust, waiting to see who talked most of the magical arts, who hinted at things they might say if they chose to but which they thought it best to conceal. I told no one I was a university researcher, knowing the suspicion it might provoke; instead, I let people believe I was a mature student in the Classics department. Later, when some of them knew me better and trusted me, I might reveal the truth.
    During the days, I continued my studies in the library. By February, my life was divided between it and the rooms where I attended my almost nightly lectures. I visited the university very seldom, to pick up mail and remind Fergusson that I was still alive. My reading habits changed. I had covered enough of the general literature to get by in discussions and the chit-chat that inevitably followed the meetings I attended, but I was still largely ignorant of the world I hoped to penetrate.
    I found all the books I could on magic, beginning with Eliphas Lévi’s
Dogme et rituel de la haute magie
and sundry works of Aleister Crowley, before going on to Ficino and Dee. Dark mysteries, arcane secrets, and page after page of gibberish. I found it wearying work, ploughing through it all, not in search of truth or power, but as a means of fashioning a mask for myself.
    But a mask is only a mask, and if it is tied on with string, so much the more visible. I needed something more than the names of authors I had read, and jargon I had mastered. In the middle