The Stargate Conspiracy (41 page)

Although it is easy to understand the appeal of magick to someone like Hubbard, who was naturally a mystic at heart, the involvement of a rocket scientist like Parsons is harder to comprehend. Yet this is by no means a unique combination. Many of the most influential occultists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were fascinated by technology. One of the few to research this neglected field is Theo Paijmans, who has written about the work of John Worrell Keely, whose ideas about sonic technology have been seized upon recently as possible explanations of how the pyramids were built,
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although it was actually Madame Blavatsky who first made the link.
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A striking — and very relevant — example is the fact that the reading list for new members of the Argenteum Astrum included
The Fourth Dimension
by C. Howard Hinton.
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Published in 1904, this was one of the earliest works to deal with the subject of higher dimensions and their possible visible manifestations in our three-dimensional world. This was the direct forerunner of ideas that Richard Hoagland invokes in his Message of Cydonia. Initiates of Crowley’s magickal order were required to familiarise themselves with this work, because it dealt with hyperdimensionality, which even today is considered a highly abstruse and specialised field of science and mathematics.

The magickal philosophy of the Argenteum Astrum, derived from
The Book of the Law,
has many striking parallels to that of another group of alleged extraterrestrial intelligences, the Nine. The A∴A∴’s doctrines centre on Sirius, which is regarded as a source of great magical power: Aiwass was, in effect, an emissary from Sirius. In the A∴ A∴’s system of magickal correspondences, the number of Sirius is nine.
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Crowley stressed that Mars was going to be of supreme importance in the coming Aeon of Horus, because of that deity’s association with Mars. Obviously, the onset of the Aeon of Horus is connected with the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. In the A∴ A∴’s system the ‘influence’ of Aquarius is transmitted to Earth through the planet Saturn
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and in the Ra communications through Carla Rueckert, the Council of Nine explicitly connected themselves with that planet. Perhaps more significantly, James Hurtak teaches that Saturn plays an important role in balancing the forces in our solar system and that the pyramids of Mars are directly influenced by that planet.
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Clearly, the Nine are a more modem manifestation of Aleister Crowley’s magickal system.

In the revised 1998 edition of
The Sirius Mystery,
Robert Temple explains how he came to write the book.
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His attention was first drawn to the Dogon’s mysterious knowledge of Sirius B by Arthur M. Young, his mentor when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. In 1966, at the age of twenty-one, Temple became secretary of Young’s Foundation for the Study of Consciousness, presumably also aware that Young had been one of those present at the ‘first contact’ of the Council of Nine in 1952.

Young first mentioned the mystery surrounding the Dogon and Sirius to Temple in 1965. Two years later, having moved to London, Temple decided to follow up the story, and wrote to Young for details, receiving the translation of Griaule and Dieterlen’s
Le renard pâle
that was later stolen by the CIA, with the injunction ‘Don’t get me into it’
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and an explanation about how he had first heard about it from a character called Harry Smith, who had given him the translation.

Best known as a surrealist film-maker and artist, Harry Smith (1929 — 1991) was also a keen experimenter with hallucinogenic drugs, although he had a huge range of diverse interests. It was his character that fascinated all who met him. Eccentric, undisciplined, non-materialistic and mystical, he was the ideal guru. What is not widely known is that he was also a committed member of the OTO. As another member of the order, Jim Wasserman, said of him:

Born in 1929 in Oregon of Theosophist parents, and with a high-ranking Freemason as a grandfather, Smith studied anthropology at the University of Washington between 1941 and 1943. He moved to California in 1945, where he took what was to be his only regular job, as an office clerk. Thereafter he devoted himself to art, film-making, musicology and esoteric studies, surviving on grants and handouts from friends and followers for the rest of his life. He also received grants from Arthur M. Young. In the early 1950s he lived among the Kiowa in Oklahoma, studying their shamanistic rituals, involving the hallucinogen peyote.

Smith became a hero of the Beat generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. (In the last years of his life he was supported financially by the rock band The Grateful Dead.) Among his achievements was the compilation of early American folk recordings, the Folkways anthology, which became an enormous influence on artists such as Bob Dylan, who acknowledged his debt to the collection and recorded several songs from it. Smith received a Grammy award for his contribution to popular music in 1991.

Once again, this overt success with the counterculture of the 1960s was only half the story. The innocuous-sounding Harry Smith was also a member of both the American Crowleyite orders, the OTO and the A∴ A∴, and profoundly involved with esoteric subjects. He was a keen student of the Hermetica, in particular the writings of the great Renaissance occult philosopher Giordano Bruno. He spent sixteen years creating a magickal system to integrate Bruno’s work with the doctrines of the OTO and the Enochian magic of the Elizabethan magus, Dr John Dee. This is serious magick; modern adepts advise that Enochian workings must not be undertaken light-heartedly or by the ill prepared, as their sheer power can backfire, causing many mental and spiritual problems. (Curiously Smith’s notoriously haphazard lifestyle was completely at odds with the discipline required for such ‘High Magick’, which is characterised by months of preparation, intense focus and physical and mental privations.) But as usual, it was his membership of the OTO that attracted the most attention. Smith was a devoted follower of Crowley, helping republish some of his works, and designing a tarot pack still used by the OTO. He claimed to be Crowley’s son; although the Beast’s lifestyle virtually guaranteed the existence of illegitimate offspring, it is unlikely that Smith was actually one of that exclusive band. Both men liked to weave elaborate myths about themselves and pass them off as fact.

Significantly, the man who introduced Smith to both the OTO and the A∴A∴ in 1940s California was Charles Stansfeld Jones,
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who, as we have seen, was extraordinarily influential in the life of Jack Parsons. It is very likely that Smith and Parsons knew each other. Parsons was head of the Californian OTO at the time and, like Parsons, Smith was a Master of the Temple of the A∴A∴.

Smith studied widely in the fields of mysticism and esotericism, but always acknowledged that his beliefs remained rooted in Crowley’s works.
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Through all the vicissitudes of his remarkably eclectic career, he remained a staunch member of both the A∴A∴ and the OTO until his death in 1991. The OTO even performed a ceremony at his memorial service at St Mark’s Church in New York, which must have been something of a surprise for the Christian authorities.
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The complex web of our investigation can now be seen to lead back to strangely few people and groups, some of whom — such as prime mover Aleister Crowley and the future founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard — have been linked with intelligence agencies. And both, in their own way, have also been connected with mind control. At the heart of this web was the occult order of the A∴ A∴, which nestled inconspicuously in the shadow of the more colourful OTO, yet which has had the most extraordinary effect, not just on our dramatis personae, but also through them, on many of the key events of the twentieth century.

The A∴ A∴ emphasised the importance of Sirius - the order was obliquely named after it - and believed in non-human intelligences, which, in postwar California, came to be seen as extraterrestrials. These are the key themes of Robert Temple’s
The Sirius Mystery,
the inspiration for which, we now know, came ultimately from a member of the A∴ A∴, via someone who was involved with the Council of Nine. This cannot be a coincidence. It is also significant that, in the 1998 edition of his book, Temple has developed his original ideas to include the notion that the ‘space gods’ of the Dogon, the Nommo, did not return to the Sirius system after their civilising mission to Earth, but placed themselves in suspended animation in our solar system to return to check on our progress on their awakening. Temple hints that this time may not be far away, arguing that the spaceship containing the sleeping Nommo is orbiting Saturn.
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But why did Temple choose Saturn, of all places in the solar system, as the place where his space gods are hibernating? Perhaps an answer lies in the fact that Saturn was of great importance to both Crowley and the Nine.

Sitters in the Phyllis Schlemmer circle — particularly Sir John Whitmore - often asked Tom questions about the work of the Anglo-American mystic Alice A. Bailey. We know that the Nine regard her very highly because her works appear on Tom’s own recommended reading list, along with the works of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.
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Madame Blavatsky has been described as ‘the most influential single figure of the nineteenth-century occult revival’.
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Born in Russia (née Hahn), Madame Blavatsky soon revealed her characteristic appetite for food, magic and adventure, and the stories of her early life rival those of Aleister Crowley in their rakish and not always credible glamour. She finally settled in the United States in 1873, where she became a spiritualist medium, particularly good - one suspects - at either sleight of hand or, more charitably, at creating phenomena by artefact induction. However, mere table tilting was soon left behind, for she claimed to have made psychic contact with the Hidden Masters, or Great White Brotherhood, a group of adepts who secretly guided the human race from Tibet (derived from Saint-Yves d‘Alveydre’s Adepts of Agartha and the forerunners of the Secret Chiefs of the Golden Dawn). In a protracted torrent of words, she dashed out life’s works
Isis Unveiled
(1877) and
The Secret Doctrine
(1888), which revealed, according to her followers, an extremely erudite synthesis of Western occult traditions and Eastern mystical religions. (According to her many critics, however, the books are garbled hotch-potches.) Her doctrines blended concepts of karma with the legend of Atlantis and the idea of ‘root races’, of which ours, the ‘Aryan’, is the fifth, the immediate successor to the Atlantean. There are two more root races to come. These ideas were a profound inspiration for the Nazis, and through Karl Haushofer (who, with Rudolf Hess, helped Hitler to write
Mein Kampf
) shaped their concept of Aryan supremacy and the ‘master race’.

Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, providing many future leading lights of the esoteric world with the basis of their ideology, including, as we have seen, Schwaller de Lubicz, whose early career as a French Theosophist influenced his later development of Les Veilleurs.

It is the work of Alice Bailey with which the Nine are most impressed. Born in Manchester in England in 1880 as Alice La Trobe-Bateman, she had a strange experience at the age of fifteen that was to shape the whole of her life. One Sunday afternoon, a man dressed in Western clothes but wearing a turban came into her home and announced that she had been chosen for some great task that lay in the future.
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She emigrated with her first husband to the United States, they divorced, then she discovered the then relatively new Theosophical Society, which she joined in 1918. This was to prove a momentous decision on her part. She married Foster Bailey, a prominent American Theosophist, in 1919. He was to have a profound effect on the development of her ideology, not least because he was also a high-ranking Freemason.

In 1915, while reading Madame Blavatsky’s work, Bailey had a revelation: suddenly she knew the identity of her mysterious visitor of twenty years before. He was none other than the Master Koot Hoomi, the personal guide of Madame Blavatsky. Here, by implication, was her task: the continuation of the work of the founder of Theosophy.

In 1919 she made psychic contact with another of the Masters, a Tibetan called Djwhal Khul (often referred to simply as ‘The Tibetan’ or the ‘Master DK’). Through Bailey, the Tibetan dictated a series of twenty-four books of esoteric teaching, expanding Blavatsky’s doctrines into a system that included beings from other worlds who guide the evolution of the human race. They do this through a group of adepts called the Hierarchy of Brothers of Light (or simply, the Hierarchy), based in the Gobi Desert. Significantly, the Hierarchy is also sometimes referred to as the ‘Great Council’. Alice Bailey wrote of them in her
Initiation, Human and Solar
(1922): ‘[They are] the Group of spiritual beings on the inner planes of the solar system who are intelligent forces of nature, and who control the evolutionary processes.’
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Most significant, however, is the fact that much of Bailey’s teaching is identical to James Hurtak’s in
The Keys of Enoch,
and also echoes the work of Edgar Cayce.

The key to Bailey’s esoteric philosophy was the concept of The Seven Rays, spiritual emanations from the ‘Seven Planes of the Solar System’. Interestingly, as we have seen, Dorothy Martin, the contactee from Chicago, called her mystical organisation — cofounded with the Laugheads — “The Abbey of the Seven Rays’. And the concept of the sacred number seven features prominently in the philosophy of Arthur M. Young, who derived his idea of seven levels of material existence from the notable Theosophist A.P. Sinnett’s channelled
The Mahatma Letters
.
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