The future ended on June 17, 1952, on one of those immortal California days of blue skies and bathwater warm air. Jack was stressed and rushed, preparing a final batch of chemicals in the coachhouse laboratory at 1003 S. Orange Grove Avenue. He needed a last hand of ready cash. Bloodwork would have shown caffeine and perhaps amphetamine, maybe a little grass. It was hot enough, and Jack at 6’2 and 240 pounds dripped with nervous sweat. He’d put on weight, as the years of persecution had taken their toll on the 38 year old. The car sat packed for the trip to Mexico with Cameron, for what was a last attempt to salvage their marriage, having filed divorce papers three years earlier for ‘extreme cruelty’ their on again off again relationship was currently on. She had gone out for cigarettes which she smoked incessantly, along with weed to calm her nerves. If Jack vibed with the artist colony at San Miguel de Allende, where Cameron had been fucking the local bullfighter and the mayor, maybe they would stay south of the border.
Like D. H. Lawrence, he had a sense that there was still fierce magick under the Aztec Sun, and that if he kept chewing those bitter buttons of peyote the Sun would speak through him too. Maybe Cameron would encourage him to drape the feathered serpent of Quetzacoatl over his shoulders and become a new world saviour. Mexico has always been the underworld of California’s dreaming. When the hippy trail turned south in the Summer of Love, Jack could have been waiting for them, beaded and barefoot. Those ugly suits he wore, and which Cameron’s friends mocked him about, would have been discarded. As a tanned Castaneda, grown wise at the age of 53, some six years older than the pied-piper Timothy Leary and eighteen years older than Robert Anton Wilson, he could have sung for a new generation the song of freedom; the living link from Crowley to present time.
Or perhaps Jack would bid farewell to Cameron in El Jardin, the famous central square, leaving her as one of the three witches, linked in arms with Leonora Carrington and Renate Druks. After all, that once great love affair had gone sour as milk. He could have trailed away, knowing that she would never produce the promised soteira, nor accept the messianic role that he had so gently set before her, and that she repeatedly pushed aside. Jack could conceivably start over again, just as Crowley had. The Master failed with, or was failed by, his two most promising beloveds: Soror Ouarda, the dipsomaniac Edith Rose Kelly, and Hilarion, the barren American Jeanne Robert Foster. There was precedent in his religion for a new officer to assume the role of Scarlet Woman – and a provision in the Book of the Law – but for Jack there was a lot of history to put aside, a lot of hopes.
He would then have taken up that promised job in Israel, as his security clearance in the US lay in absolute tatters; which is why he was working as a chemist for the special effects industry on the fringes of tinsel town. He had unfinished magical business from his last major working, and the Black Pilgrimage summoned him to the black basalt remains of Chorazin. There the mantle of Antichrist would be bestowed upon him by the Prince of the Power of the Air; an inverse of Jerusalem Syndrome, where visitors to the holy city suddenly identify themselves as Christ and are admitted to the calming sanctum of the newly opened Kfar Shaul clinic. On another timeline, Cameron would have visited him, having frittered away her credit in the desert and swung back into the orbit of Jack. Perhaps she would have found herself in that clinic, sitting on the edge of the Roman winepress in the grounds, telling all who would listen that they may think that they were Jesus, but she, who warmed herself on the bricks like a serpent, was the goddess of the Apocalypse.
Jack would have been employed under the IDF by EMET, meaning ‘truth’ in Hebrew, coincidentally the same word as in the Sigillum dei Aemeth. EMET were tasked to develop the LUZ missile. Luz is the almond-shaped bone in the sacrum where the soul resides and from which the resurrection body grows. Jack would have been responsible for the propulsion technology used in the Six Day War, and which would ultimately produce both the Israeli nuclear program and the Iron Dome missile defence system.
Would he have chanted the Hymn to Pan with the first missile launch, or kept it under his breath? Regardless, his Israeli colleagues will have noticed the strange beliefs of the American stranger in a strange land, just as they had at CALTEC. He would have visited Hermon, the sacred mountain of the fallen angels and seen the resting places of the nephilim. He will no doubt have continued his sexual adventures with the bold daughters of Jerusalem; the roses of Sharon, the lilies of the valleys, his left hand beneath their heads and his right hand embracing them. One of whom could have displaced the chaotic Cameron and brought forth further revelations.
I can see Jack being driven from Israel herself as his messianism burned hot again, too hot for the orthodox, or for military discipline. Perhaps he would have gone to Egypt and the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza to close the circuit with Crowley’s encounter at the dawning of the New Age. And certainly he would have travelled to Europe in search of the witchcraft.
But none of these futures came to pass.
The chemical job called for fulminate of mercury, a powerful primary explosive, which he mixed in a coffee tin and then accidentally knocked from the bench. He reached after it in the air and it slipped through his fingers to explode in contact with the ground; the blast wave travelling at 4250 meters per second setting off a chain reaction with the other chemicals stored haphazardly about the lab in cardboard boxes. His final words, the impossibly poignant, ‘I wasn’t done.’
Thelema lost its prodigal son 77 years ago.
It is time to take up the sword.
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