Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

"Yes?" he breathed, wondering if his hairs were standing on end, too, in orthodox fashion.

"Sput Sputnik," said the Presence, "I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."

A biological breakthrough will force a new militancy, a new crusade. "Make the world safe for Immortality," will be the cry.

–segerberg, The Immortality Factor

On May 1, 1976, Cagliostro and Norma were in Mexico City on a vacation. At lunch she held up a twenty-centavo piece and said, "Isn't that the same as the design on back of the dollar?"

"It's Masonic," he said. "The Mexican and American revolutionaries were both predominantly Freemasons."

"What does it mean, anyway-an eye floating above a pyramid?"

He started to explain about the Third Eye and the pineal gland, and then noticed that she wasn't listening.

"They're waiting for you," she said in a mediumismic voice.

John Disk, in 1984, read Cagliostro's notes on the next three days very carefully:

"I refused to believe it. I put her to every possible test, whenever the voice spoke. Looking for evidence of autosuggestion and self-hypnosis, I found evidence of autosuggestion and self-hypnosis- naturally! I also found seventeen things I couldn't explain. Most central was the fact that the message, when I finally encouraged her, came in Enochian, a language which nobody understands since all we possess are the nineteen fragments received by Dee and Kelly in the seventeenth century. Yet she gave me nineteen new fragments, and translated them, and the grammar and vocabulary are consistent with the Dee-Kelly scryings. Even if she had studied the Dee and Kelly fragments (which she swears she hasn't), concocting new sentences in that unknown language would be beyond the power of any human brain or even of any known computer…"

The nineteen fragments of Enochian, translated by Norma in the same trance in which the fragments arrived, became the nineteen chapters of The Aquarian Gospel. Crane wrote in the introduction:

"It is impossible to doubt that these are the communications of a superior intelligence. If the reader is, as I am [thank God!], an atheist, the identity of that intelligence will pose severe mysteries. Is it interplanetary-or interstellar? A being leaping across Time from some more advanced future, or past [Atlantis]? Does it come from dimensions tangent to, but not identical with, our own? I propose no answer to these questions, but I am sure that this intelligence, or others like it, sent the messages which founded the great religions of the past, and that such communications are the foundation of the belief in beings called 'gods.'…"

Norma was killed in an automobile accident the day the book was published."What further proof do we need," a prominent clergyman wrote in his syndicated newspaper column, "that this foul and obscene 'revelation' comes from a source not divine, but diabolical?"

Crane's first-and only-failure to escape from a challenge box occurred one month later.

The eye operation came later that year. "I can save one," the doctor told him, "but not both."

"A blind magician is worse off than a deaf musician, and I'm not Beethoven," Crane said simply. "Do the best you can."

He retained the sight of one eye.

"Much as we are inclined to sympathize," the New York Daily News editorialized, "we do admit to a strong feeling that there is divine retribution in the tragedies befalling drug-cultist Cagliostro 'the Great.' "

The Aquarian Gospel was burned by a citizens' group in Cicero, Illinois, that week.

"These powers, whoever and whatever they are," Crane wrote-in unpublished notes which John Disk read years later, weeping- "are determined that I abandon all else and become no more than the servant who carries their message. To this end, they are taking away from me, one by one, all the things I love. Or, perhaps, I am merely in the terminal stages of a long-brewing paranoid psychosis?"

Hugh Crane celebrated his fourteenth birthday in 1938 by climbing into the bed of the family's black maid, Sophie Hage, who introduced him to Voudon.

The group in Harlem at that time actually combined elements of Voudon and Masonry. Since Voudon was already a blend of European witchcraft and African magic, and Masonry is a mixture of elements from Rosicrucian mysticism and French revolutionary free thought, there were actually four traditions involved, and the Rite of Initiation was unique. Borrowed from the third degree of Masonry, it replaced Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum with the Grand Zombi, and, since marijuana was involved, the ordeal became as real as in those days when candidates knew they would be killed if they failed.

In a dark cellar on 110th Street, the Grand Zombi demanded, "Reveal the Secret Word or I will kill you. Reveal the Secret Word and give up your quest for Truth and Power."

Hugh, repeating the formula taught him, replied, "Kill me if you must, but I will search again for Truth and Power as soon as I am reborn."

The Grand Zombi, black face above a black robe, raised his sword. "Do you fear me now, mortal?" he screamed.

"I have eternity to work in," Hugh replied, according to rote. "Why should I fear?"

"Then die!" screamed the Zombi- the part of the Rite which had not been explained to the candidate in advance- and Hugh felt the sword cross his neck and saw the blood spurting.

He also saw the bulb which the Zombi squeezed to make the blood spurt out of the end of the sword.

And he understood the manufacture of reality and power completely.

DECEMBER 24, 1983:

Marvin Gardens was awake again; the downers hadn't fully taken the edge off the coke excitation.

He had turned the radio on, but the only thing worth listening to was Handel's Messiah- the fourth time he had caught parts of it this week-and they were in the middle of "He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." Not quite what he needed at this hour, with the early morning Manhattan permeation of suicides and accidental overdoses skulking in the shadows. He wished they would get on to the Hallelujah Chorus.

Marvin found a book he'd never finished- The Autobiography of Cagliostro the Great. He opened at random and started reading:

"Get a a job," my father said. Turning back, I saw the beggar falling to the ground, obviously fainting from starvation, but when he landed I knew, from his limpness, that it was more than a faint: that he was dead.

It has sometimes occurred to me that there is a parallel here to the famous experience of the Buddha, who, like myself, had the misfortune to be born rich and only discovered what life is like for most people when he encountered a beggar and a corpse. Is this parallel an accident? I am not sure: I cannot say when I was elected, or drafted, to receive the Aquarian message, the great affirmation that "All is joy," in contrast to the Buddha's equally true, equally false, but now obsolete "All is sorrow."

We never see what is in front of our eyes. My father did not see what happened inside me when that beggar died; I have brought men and women to the edge of the Vision, by various tactics, and they, afraid to see it, ran off to psychiatrists.

"It's really very simple to remember the order of the ten planets," Blake Williams explained to Natalie."Just memorize the sentence 'Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue.' Got it?"

"Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue," Natalie repeated dubiously.

"That's all," Williams said proudly. "You just use the initial letter of each word as a mnemonic, and you've got all ten planets. Mercury Venus Earth Mars the asteroids Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto Mickey and Goofy."