“Take it from me, young man: the realm of Isaïs and of Assja Shotokalungin is the realm of the blood from which there is no escaping, neither here, nor on the other side, neither for the good Doctor Dee, nor for John Roger, Esquire, nor for you. You have to accept that.”
“Where can I find salvation?” I cry, leaping to my feet.
“Vajroli Tantra,” comes the answer from a cloud of smoke. It strikes me that he always conceals his face in that manner when he speaks those words.
“What is Vajroli Tantra?” I ask curtly.
“The gnostics called it ‘making the Jordan flow backwards’. You can easily guess what that refers to. But it not only refers to the physical action, which is pretty obscene. You must discover the mystery behind it yourself; if I were to try to explain it, you would be left with an empty shell. The physical rite without the inner mystery is like dabbling in red magic: it just creates a fire you cannot extinguish. Mankind has little idea of these forces; they ramble on about black magic and white magic. But the inner mystery ...” suddenly, in the middle of the sentence, Lipotin’s explanation becomes a droning sing-song, like the monotonous prayers of a Tibetan monk. It sounds as if it is not Lipotin, but some distant, invisible being speaking from the red scarf:
“What is bound shall be loosed; what is divided shall be joined through love; love shall be overcome through hate; hate through knowledge; knowledge through oblivion: that is the stone of the diamantine void.”
The words swirl past me; I cannot grasp them, cannot hold them. For a brief moment I feel the Baphomet above me, listening. I bow my head and try to listen with him, but my ears remain deaf.
When I look up again – despondent – Lipotin has disappeared from my room.
Was he really ever there?
More “time” has passed, time that I have not measured. I have wound up all my clocks, and I can hear them busily ticking away, but as I did not set them, each one shows a different time – which seems appropriate to my strange state. I sleep whenever sleep overcomes me, in some chair in some room or other, it does not matter which. Light I take for day and dark for night, whether it be the blackness of real night or merely the overcast sky and the grimy windowpanes which awake the countless pale shadows in my rooms to spectral life.
I know that writing down my recent conversation with the phantom by the name of “Lipotin” is no proof that I am alive or, as men put it, have died, but I have done it, and will continue to do so. Perhaps I only imagine the ink and the paper and the letters and in reality I am etching it onto my memory. But where, basically, is the difference?
The idea of “reality” is unfathomable, but more unfathomable still is the “I”. When I try to describe the state “I” was in before Lipotin entered, announced by two cheeky schoolboys ringing my bell, the only word that seems appropriate is: unconscious. And yet there is a voice within me saying that I was not unconscious, but that I was in some other state of being that I can no longer recall. If it had been eternal life, how could I have returned from eternity to the infinity of life? that would have been impossible: eternity is separate from infinity and no-one can fly back and forth across the abyss dividing them. Perhaps Jane partakes of eternal life and that is why she cannot hear my cries for help. My cry goes up into infinity and instead of Jane comes Assja Shotokalungin.
In what state of being did I spend all that “time”? I become more and more certain that someone who has progressed far beyond human life instructed me in an occult science, for which human tongues have no words, in secrets and mysteries which will be made plain to me one day. Oh that I had a trusty adviser, as my ancestor John Dee, whose being and essence I have inherited, had in his assistant Gardner!
Lipotin has not come back, nor do I miss him. What he had to bring, he has brought; a strange messenger of the unknown, faithful and faithless at the same time.
I have spent a long time pondering his advice and I think that I have some inkling of the deeper significance of “Vajroli Tantra”, but how can I put it into practice? I will make every effort to get to the bottom of it, but I keep coming up against Lipotin’s words, that it is impossible to escape from the realm of sexuality.
I will keep a record of my doings from day to day, but will not date them. What point would there be in a dead man insisting on the right date? What do I care about the calendar people submit to in the world outside. I have come to haunt my own house.
I feel an immense weariness and, at the same time, curiosity. Are they harbingers of Assja Shotokalungin?
The night that has just passed was the first that I have spent with a clear mind.
No, it was not coincidence that I was overcome with such profound tiredness. But from my tiredness emerged the iron resolve to risk the first sortie. As one combats poison with a counterpoison or antidote, so I determined to combat the sleep that was creeping over me; I called up the “counter-poison”: not Jane but Princess Shotokalungin.
But she did not appear as I had expected. She did not obey me. She was
