The Vengeful Djinn: Unveiling the Hidden Agenda of Genies (30 page)

The Necronomicon appears elsewhere in Lovecraft's works. "The Book" (1934) does not mention it by name, but revolves around a "worm-riddled book" of rituals obtained by the narrator, who uses it to access what appears to be a parallel dimension. After chanting a "monstrous litany" from within five concentric circles, he acquires a permanent shadow entity and is swept away by a black wind into an unknown abyss. When he manages to return, his perception of the world is permanently changed, and the shadow is permanently attached to him. The shadow is interesting-could it be similar to the shadow people phenomenon described earlier?

Did Lovecraft possess secret occult knowledge of the djinn, or did his fertile imagination access their realm without his realizing it? Many science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors are visionaries of genuine realities, and they bring awareness of those realities into our dimension via their work. Perhaps Lovecraft had experiences he never acknowledged that seeded his inspiration. Carl L. Johnson, Lovecraft scholar and founder of the H. P. Lovecraft Commemorative Activities Committee notes:

One may further postulate that he was capable of receiving such knowledge from an ethereal repository outside himself .. in his words, `the Mind which is held by no head.' Time may reveal if Lovecraft was merely a weaver of convincing tales, or something of a prophet in his own right. Cultists still do devise and perform rituals intended to open chasms to the Dread Dimension and unleash denizens of the nether world(s), with rites based largely on the fantasy of Lovecraft.2o

Anton Szandor Laney (1930-1997), who founded the Church of Satan in 1966, was inspired by Lovecraft in creating rituals for his church. Laney, whose real name was Howard Stanton Levey, believed Lovecraft was influenced by real occult sources. Wrote Laney:

Whether his sources of inspiration were consciously recognized and admitted or a remarkable psychic absorption, one can only speculate. There is no doubt that Lovecraft was aware of rites not quite "nameless," as the allusions in his stories are often identical to actual ceremonial procedures and nomenclature, especially to those practiced and advanced around the turn of the 19th-20th centuries!21

Djinn and the Golden Dawn

LaVey's comments move us into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the greatest Western esoteric order, founded in England in 1888 by individuals steeped in occultism, including the Kabbalah, Freemasonry, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and Western esoteric and magical lore.

The Golden Dawn began as an esoteric order and evolved along magical lines, using as primary sources the Key ofSolomon, The Book of Sacred Magic ofAbra-Melin the Mage, and Enochian magic-all of which have djinn roots.

The Book of Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage is heavily derivative of the Key. It is attributed to Abra-Melin (also spelled Abramelin), a Jewish Kabbalistic mage of Wurzburg, Germany, who supposedly wrote the grimoire for his son in 1458. Though the manuscript claims to be a translation of Abra-Melin's original Hebrew manuscript, it was written in French in the eighteenth
century, probably by an anonymous source. According to the story
presented in the manuscript, Abra-Melin learned his Kabbalahbased magical knowledge from angels, who told him how to conjure demons and tame them into personal servants and workerssimilar to King Solomon-and how to raise storms. He said that
all things in the world are created by demons, who work under
the direction of angels. Each person has an angel and a demon as
familiar spirits, similar to the daimones and the qarin. Abramelin
magic is based on sacred names and on magical squares of numbers, for purposes such as conjuring spirits, invisibility, levitation
and flight, commanding spirits, necromancy, shapeshifting, and
other feats, all within the abilities and powers of the djinn.

Enochian magic evolved from the sixteenth-century occult
work done by John Dee, the royal astronomer to Queen Elizabeth I, and his assistant, Edward Kelly, who claimed to have psychic ability. Dee and Kelly used scrying and Kelly's mediumship
to communicate with beings they identified as angels. Dee and
Kelly developed an alphabet and genuine language-Enochian-
for constructing "calls" for contacting angels and spirits, and for
projecting consciousness into levels of awareness called "aethyrs."
Enochian has a melodic sound similar to Sanskrit, Greek, or Arabic. Kelly-who had a reputation for fraud-may have invented
the language himself, telling Dee that it was spoken by angels in
the Garden of Eden. Dee and Kelly developed nineteen calls of
ascending magnitude. The nineteenth call included thirty aethyrs
that were never precisely defined, but which the Golden Dawn believed represented new levels of consciousness. The only member
of the Golden Dawn during its short original life ever known to
work actively with the aethyrs was Aleister Crowley.

Aleister Crowley, "The Beast of the Apocalypse"

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was arguably the most colorful figure to ever emerge in Western magical history. Precocious and dark in temperament from an early age, he seemed to possess an innate rapport with the spirit world, as well as a natural ability to tap into its power. Though his mother referred to him as "the Beast" and he later called himself "the Beast of the Apocalypse," he was not a Satanist. He envisioned ushering in a new religion and spiritual age, the Aeon of Horns, based on his system of Thelemic magic inspired by his experiences with entities. In 1898, he joined the Golden Dawn, but clashed violently in personality and power issues with Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one of the original founders. Within a couple of years, Crowley was kicked out and went off on his own.

Crowley had numerous entity contacts and was adept at conjuring, or evoking, them in magical rituals. In addition to his own inspirations, he used Abramelin and Enochian magic. Three entities are of interest to us for their possible djinn connections.

In 1903, Crowley married Rose Kelly, the first of two wives, who had mediumistic ability. They spent their honeymoon in Cairo in 1904, where Rose spontaneously made contact with an entity named Aiwass (originally spelled Aiwaz). Aiwass said he was a messenger for the Egyptian trinity of deities Isis, Osiris, and Horns. Crowley had a vision of him, seeing Aiwass as a man dressed in old Assyrian or Persian clothing and having what he described as:

... a body of "fine matter" or astral matter, transparent as a veil of gauze or a cloud of incense-smoke. He seemed to be a tall, dark man in his thirties, well-knit, active and strong, with the face of a savage king, and eyes veiled lest their gaze should destroy what they saw.
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Aiwass ordered Crowley to take dictation. For three hours between April 8 and 10, 1904, the entity spoke in a voice that emanated directly out of the air, while Crowley wrote in longhand. The result was the The Book of the Law, the seminal work of Thelemic magic, which contains the axiom "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." In other words, do what you must to surrender to total alignment with cosmic law.

For years, Crowley remained in awe of Aiwass, and admitted he never fully understood exactly who or what the entity was. He alternately described him as a god, demon, devil, preterhuman intelligence, minister or messenger of other gods, and his own guardian angel. For a time, he considered Aiwass part of his own subconscious, but then rejected the idea, favoring at last the explanation that the entity was his holy guardian angel, or an aspect of his higher self. Crowley also said he was occasionally allowed to see Aiwass in a physical appearance, inhabiting a human body like a normal human being.

Over the years, opinions on Aiwass have run the gamut from benign to evil. It cannot be determined whether or not Aiwass was a djinni, of course, but his smoke-like dark appearance, Middle Eastern garb, and ability to take on human form evoke djinn associations. Was Crowley in contact with a djinn representative who wished to channel certain ideas into the mortal world?

In 1909, Crowley made contact with Choronzon, an entity known by Dee (who spelled the name "Coronzon" and referred to it as 333). Dee never considered Choronzon a demon, but Crowley called it "the Demon of Dispersion" and "the Demon of the Abyss." He also said Choronzon was the "first and deadliest of all the powers of evil," and a being comprised of "complete negation."23
Could Choronzon be Iblis, or one of his high-ranking djinn?

In December of 1909, Crowley and his assistant, Victor Neuberg, went into the desert outside Algiers to conduct rituals for the
purpose of accessing the high-level aethyrs in the nineteenth call of
Enochian magic. Crowley had a number of breakthroughs in consciousness as a result, including the instruction that he would have
to confront Choronzon and cross the Abyss.

In an evocation, a magician stays within the protection of a
magical circle and evokes an entity into a separate magical triangle.
Crowley intended to break that rule and sit within the triangle, go
into trance, and offer his own body for possession-a dangerous
magical act.

According to Crowley's account, Neuberg, standing within the
protected magical circle, got the brunt of the entity's force. First
Choronzon manifested in the form of a seductive female prostitute,
and then turned into an old man, and then into a snake. Choronzon told Neuberg he spat upon the name of the Most High. He
was Master of the Triangle who had no fear of the pentagram. He
said he would give Neuberg words that seemed like great secrets of
magic but would be worthless, as a joke.

Choronzon breached the protection of the magical circle around
Neuberg, and the two wrestled physically. Although some observers have opined that Neuberg wrestled with a demon-entranced
Crowley, Neuberg insisted he fought the entity itself. It had frothcovered fangs and attempted to tear out his throat. After a considerable struggle, Neuberg forced Choronzon back into the triangle,
and repaired his magical circle. The two hurled insults and threats
at each other, and Choronzon vanished.

Crowley and Neuberg felt they had bested the demon, and
Crowley considered himself to have achieved great magical status
as a result. Some critics of Crowley's work believe that Choronzon
left a permanent mental and psychic scar upon him.

We cannot prove Choronzon's true identity, but like Aiwass,
djinn presence is strongly suggested. The snake is a favored form
of djinn, and the Trickster-like taunting is telling as well. A hostile
djinni summoned from the depths of its realm in another dimension might easily attack in such an aggressive manner, boasting
that the magical "rules" of mortals had no effect upon him.

In 1918, Crowley made contact with a powerful entity named
Lam, who was to help him fulfill the work Aiwass had began. The
contact was made through a sex magic ritual in which he opened
a portal "in the spaces between stars" (a parallel dimension), enabling Lam to enter the physical universe. Crowley believed Lam
to be the soul of a dead Tibetan lama from Leng, between China
and Tibet. Lam is Tibetan for "Way" or "Path," which Crowley
said had the numerical value of 71, or "No Thing," a gateway to
the Void and a link between the star systems of Sirius and Andromeda.

Since that time, some followers of Crowley's work have come
to believe that the portal he opened continues to widen, enabling
other entities to enter our world that are behind our experiences
with UFOs and extraterrestrials. As we have noted, we found a significant connection between djinn and UFOs/ETs. Crowley drew
an image of Lam, and it is believed by some that meditating on or
contemplating this image enables contact with Lam and access to
the portal. The entry of entities through a portal to a parallel realm
is yet another interesting correlation with the history and activities
of djinn.

The idea that the djinn may be behind major forces of Western occult thought will undoubtedly be controversial to some, and
be outright rejected by others. We believe the evidence is there,
and has been hiding in plain sight for centuries, just like the djinn
themselves. If factions of the djinn are intent on regaining their
hold on the physical world, they would infiltrate as many streams of human thought and action as possible. Certainly we should
expand our perspective beyond the entities familiar to us in the
West, an act that could help us gain valuable insight into the nature of all our extraordinary experiences.

Real-Time EVP of Djinn

There is yet another way we might be in contact with djinn, one
that is quite popular with modern paranormal researchers and investigators: electronic voice phenomena, or EVP. Ever since the
development of the telegraph, tape recording, the telephone, the
radio, and high-tech communications, people have been hearing
and recording mysterious voices of unknown origin. In the 1970s,
these voices came to be called electronic voice phenomena. Most
of the voices are thought to be of the dead, and some from extraterrestrial or ultraterrestrial realms.

In traditional EVP (developed since the early twentieth century),
a recorder is turned on, questions are asked, time is allowed to
elapse for an answer, and the recording is played back. Answers to
the questions-EVP-may appear in the gaps. Newer techniques
involve real-time answers, that is, hearing the voices live rather than
passively after they are recorded. Real-time EVP is one of the cutting-edge technologies of paranormal research.

We have been experimenting with a range of equipment for
real-time EVP, taking it to different paranormal hot spots to see
if we can contact the dead or beings in other dimensions. The devices used for this employ radio sweep. They are popularly known
as "ghost boxes" and "Frank's boxes," the latter name referring to
one of the developers in the field, Frank Sumption. The boxes
rapidly scan the AM band of radio (some also scan FM) to create a jumbled noise matrix composed of broadcast fragments. This
matrix of sound seems to facilitate the manifestation of mystery
voices. Their answers do not come from the fragments of radio broadcast, but are superimposed on top of the jumbled sound. We
acknowledge that the use of real-time EVP boxes is controversial
and unpredictable-you never know what you are going to get,
and it is often impossible to validate the identities of communicators, because the communications are brief. Like passive EVP, answers to questions usually are just one to several words. Getting a
communicator to "stay on the line," so to speak, is difficult, probably because of our limited technology.