The Men in Black
and their Magical Origins

"...we are dealing with a full-size world-mystery and a real fight between the Black and White Brotherhoods."
- Frater Achad, 1948

Throughout medieval times, a major current of thought distinct from official religion existed, culminating in the works of the alchemists and hermetics. Among such groups were to be found some of the early modern scientists and men remarkable for the strength of their independent thinking and their adventurous life, such as Paracelsus. The nature of the beings who mysteriously appeared, dressed in shiny garments or covered with dark hair, and with whom communication was so hard to establish intrigued these men intensely."
- Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia

 

In 1947 the CIA was organized and the first UFO cases burst upon the American media landscape as "flying saucers." In that year, also, the first modern visitation by the infamous Men in Black took place in which a witness, one Harold Dahl, was silenced. From that point on, a pattern began to emerge. The Men In Black legend is perennial; that it shows up in connection with the UFO lore should come as no surprise. UFOlogy bizarro chronicler John Keel ( Disneyland of the Gods, Jadoo, etc.) observed in his UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse: " The records of demonology are filled with striking parallels ... the general descriptions of the vampires themselves are identical to the 'men in black.' The dark skin and angular, Oriental-like faces were commonly reported ..."

The Autobiography of Malcolm X described Malcolm's encounter with an MIB in prison: "He had on a dark suit I remember. I could see him as plainly as I see anyone I look at. He wasn't black, and he wasn't white. He was light-brown skinned, an Asiatic cast of countenance, and he had oily black hair..." It is interesting that the celebrated film Malcolm X chooses to imply that this figure was Nation of Islam leader Elijah Mohammed. While Elijah Mohammed and his mysterious teacher Wallace Fard (who vanished without a trace) had come out of High Degree Prince Hall Freemasonry, and certainly knew some of the esoteric secrets, the being Malcolm X described is more in accord with Aleister Crowley's description of the praterhuman intelligence Aiwass than of Elijah Mohammed.

"In the shadows, the Men in Black had long lurked, biding their time, waiting. Here and there, now and then, some people thought they had seen them, but they weren't quite certain; perhaps they more sense than actually regarded them...
"Fourteen years earlier, the shadowy visitors had shown themselves openly. Then they had descended upon flying saucer buffs, threatening and terrorizing them, hushing them up...

"Al K. Bender, a UFO researcher, had been the first known victim ...he performed a certain experiment and the lurking horror came. It began with glowing blue lights. Then came the stranger with the luminous eyes in the darkened theatre, and later on a dusky street. It culminated when the Men in Black, three of them, paid him a visit ...."

- Gray Barker, The Silver Bridge

UFOlogist Gray Barker got his one and only best-selling book in detailing the Albert K. Bender story and the world-wide wave of silencings. They Knew Too Much about the Flying Saucers was an international success. It was widely assumed that the Men in Black were either government agents or extraterrestrials, but as researchers Wilgus and Keel have shown, the eye in the triangle was sometimes their only insignia, while my own research showed startling parallels to certain black magick rituals in medieval times which provoked visitations by what was often called "the Man in Black" -- widely understood to be the Devil himself. Even Barker noted that Albert K. Bender's experiments were more like a magical conjuration than an attempt at extraterrestrial communication. Any initiated magician reading Bender's accounts would recognize the elements of magical conjuration immediately.

Maybe, I mused, we were dealing more with magick than with Martians.

The Black Lodge

"Mathers, of course, carried on; but he had fallen. The Secret Chiefs cast him off; he fell into deplorable abjection, even his scholarship deserted him. He published nothing new and lived in sodden intoxication till death put an end to his long misery. He was a great man in his way..."
- Aleister Crowley

"What I am out to complain of is what I seriously believe to be an organized conspiracy of the Black Lodges to prevent people from thinking..."
- Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears.

Often when a person or institution allied with the historical Great White Brotherhood approaches success (variously defined) or comes into possession of certain aspects of transcendent wisdom, Something Intervenes. That something has been defined as the Man in Black, the Men In Black, the black lodges, or The Black Lodge. The latter term most nearly accommodates my own view. That they need to do this, and that they often fail in their efforts, is itself an indication that (A) the Black Lodge is opposed by Something Else, equally as strong, and (B) they are afraid of something we might find out -- about them, about their opposition, about ourselves or all three.

The story of our interaction with the UFOnauts begins with the Qabalistic Tree of Life, and the Chakra system of the body.

According to the primal occult and frequently secret and subversive view, the manifest universe emerges from an Ultimate NOT-Thing, a Consciousness or Beingness beyond words or expressions sometimes referred to as the Unmanifest or The Limitless Light. This Unmanifest cannot be understood in the external sense, but can be Known in the Gnostic sense by the initiate or perfected sentient being, the Ubermensch. It can be plugged into.

For reasons equally inexpressible, this uniqueness unfolds itself in manifestation. Thus, the limitless light becomes a series of emanations or expressions or Intelligences that devolve increasingly toward our material form of existence and thus towards accessibility in the conventional sense. But the manifestations also increasingly become subject to subdivision into arbitrary concepts such as "good" and "evil" as these are commonly understood. And they also become closer and closer in form and content to our own mundane reality, though in the relativity of things, these Higher Intelligences may seem unspeakably powerful, mythic and divine.

The Gnostic view has tended to be that what the external world of the conventional person understands as god, devil demon, angel or, more recently, extraterrestrial beings are, in fact, such emanations of the unspeakable ultimate. Indeed, the ancient Gnostics saw the 'god' and 'devil' of conventional theology as an ego-maddened entity under the delusion that it, indeed, IS the Ultimate Being! The late Phil Dick, in his last Gnostic allegorical fiction, eventually settled on the name "V.A.L.I.S." or "Vast Active Living intelligence System" for this being or Demiurge. He wrestled through his literary career and secret life as a Christian Gnostic philosopher with whether VALIS was a benevolent, if machine-like deity of a sort, or an insane extraterrestrial supercomputer.

Throughout recorded history, and, from the evidence of primitive objects and works of art, for aeons before, certain humans have had the capacity to tune into or channel various of these Higher Intelligences with varying degrees of accuracy. These humans have been our Seers, Oracles and Prophets. It appears, in fact, that much of the source-material of all religions comes from such channelings, including, arguably, The Book of Revelation, The Book of Mormon, and The Book of the Law.

Concurrently, and not coincidentally, the two great initiatory bodies, or orders have been generated and regenerated throughout history. The so-called Great White Brotherhood, when undistorted, appears (according to legend) guided by Intelligences associated with the dual star system Sirius or Sothis in some manner [see The Sirius Mystery by Robert Temple for a discussion of the Sirius connection -- also Kenneth Grant's Outside the Circles of Time discusses the matter from a magical perspective].

This brotherhood also seems to have the purpose of uplifting human character and initiating biological and social evolution designed to move towards identification with Ultimate Being. What is sometimes called "the Black Lodge," which we may associate with the Gnostic Demiurge or Phil Dick's VALIS, is generated to keep humanity in a state of materialist trance and evolutionary stagnation.

Mystics generally consider that understanding the motivations of either of these Sources may be beyond our knowledge or even our capabilities. Existentially, however, it may be stated with confidence that one is dedicated to keep us in subjugation, misery and stagnation; the other to our betterment and enrichment though both at times have made claims to being our saviors.

There are keys for decoding which is which -- for example, rituals that have been generated or handed down to the magical lodges of modern times which refer to a star or the stars directly or indirectly tend to be transformative and thus of the Great White Brotherhood. Ciphers for decoding messages between the black lodges and their alien sponsors have always existed. But confusions of a deliberate nature exist; the ancient Gnostics uncovered a cipher which clearly indicates that the story of the Garden of Eden in its conventional form is turned on its head. The Serpent is clearly the symbol of Knowledge, Wisdom, the Kundalini Yogic force, the Will-current -- that is, it is the symbol of Liberation and Self-Mastery. The jealous "gods," as read in the original manuscripts, are clearly the forces of blockage, self-denial and repression -- which is to say, the Intelligences governing the Black Lodge. This Knowledge of Good and Evil and Life and Death has been the Terrible Secret of Initiates throughout history, recorded in ciphers and myths, and passed on through ritual.

The Black Lodge may be defined as the organized institution guided by VALIS for the purpose of holding back human evolution and keeping a slave mentality in place. Its human leaders are the "black brothers" who are not to be mistaken for mere black magicians. Indeed, Aleister Crowley observed that "the 'Black Magician' or Sorcerer is hardly even a distant cousin of the 'Black Brother.' The difference between a sneak-thief and a Hitler is not too bad an analogy..." The Black Brothers are highly advanced adepts of the Art who have simply, as the popular phrase goes, "been seduced by the dark side of the Force." At certain times and places in history -- for example, medieval Tibet or, in more modern times, Nazi Germany -- the Black Lodge as operated more or less openly with characteristic occult symbols of human skulls, lightning bolts, etc. out in the open. But like the Great White Brotherhood that it actively seeks to subvert and overthrow (as it did in the time of the Knights Templar), the Black Lodge has generally communicated by cipher and myth, in silence and secrecy, often within religious, fraternal and political institutions dedicated to the status quo.

In the West since at least the early 18th century, the Black Lodge has tended to operate along crypto-Masonic lines, and its development has tended to coincide with and mirror that of the Great White Brotherhood. This development may, in fact, be attributed to a cosmic principle of "equal generation of forces." Thus, the birth of the modern form, as the fraternity of the knights militant of the New Aeon in the cultural and political turbulence of Germany in the 1890s, may fairly (along with the coincident peak in the development of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Universal Gnostic Church) be characterized as the resurgence of the Great White Brotherhood and its rejuvenation out of the degeneration of classical speculative freemasonry. This coincides closely with the "Great Airship Scare" of 1897.

At almost the same moment, and in the same unhappy land, the Black Lodge reasserted itself in the form of such fraternities as the Vril Society and the Thule Group. The full story of the Vril Society, the Thule Group, the Ahnenerbe, the Schwartze Orden (The Black Order) and other manifestations of the Black Lodge in the pre-Nazi and Nazi era has yet to be told, though Pauwels and Bergier take an informal stab at it in The Morning of the Magicians. Rudolph Hess, the last known member of the Thule Group, told Jack Fishman (The Seven Men of Spandau) that Thule leader and occult initiate General Karl Haushofer (1869-1946) "was the magician, the secret Master..." of Nazi Germany. Hess believed in the cause to the end of his life. The last prisoner at Spandau, Hess died at the significant age of 93, proclaiming his loyalty to the Thule ideal to the very end.

The period, in the middle 1930s, in which these groups attained their greatest, ruinous power over the German state coincides closely with the reports of "ghost rockets" over Northern Europe. The British Raj in India, and the European Christian colonization of the East in general, had all but destroyed the classical Tantrism and Illuminism of the Great White Brotherhood in the East, finding such institutions as Temple Prostitution, chakra-puji, Shiva devotion, etc. to be sexual obscenity.

Karl Haushofer

On the other hand, fearing the power of the Black Lodge as a political entity and eroding its hold on esoteric Eastern Religion as a practical necessity had provoked the British to effectively dismantle the classical Eastern manifestation of the Black Lodge, and Western occultists visiting the East in the 19th and early 20th century already could only find watered-down remnants and secret adepts carrying on the hidden wisdom in either form. The Great White Brotherhood survived in Tibet along with the Dark Lodges, and, since the Chinese occupation, many of its chiefs have found their way to India and around the world.

As far as is known, the last classical chakra-puj to be observed by a Westerner was in the 1930s, while the last ancient intact body of adepts of the Eastern Black Lodge, ironically dedicated to foisting upon sleeping humanity a rank and demoralizing materialism, was discovered and destroyed in accordance with the insipid Marxism which guided the Chinese "People's" Liberation Army into Tibet in the late 1950s. Among various Tantric Buddhist and Bon religious institutions, the P.L.A. liquidated the cavern retreats of Schamballah and Agarthi, the former being possibly the oldest surviving branch of the Black Lodge on the planet. (See Ossendovski's Men, Beasts and Gods, circa 1925, for an account of Schamballah and Agarthi.) As survivors of the Marxist massacre from the Tibetan Great White Brotherhood are known to have come to the West in subsequent years, it may be assumed that survivors of the Black Lodge have set up operations in our own society as well. We can see the marks of their presence in so-called right-handed Eastern circles that have gained a certain currency among Westerners, and which peddle a Western mystics including Karl Kellner, P.B. Randolph and G.I. Gurdjieff received instruction from surviving institutions of the Great White Brotherhood and carried their influence back with them to Europe, just as the Templars had done centuries before, and incorporated their teachings into the Western Esoteric System.

It is known that the Black Lodge -- which, as it opposes evolution, inherently fights a rear-guard action -- has made unceasing war on the Great White Brotherhood in the West from the beginnings of the magical revival. Indeed, fallen and failed adepts of the Great White Brotherhood have become the tools and pawns of the Black Lodge, from Mathers to Hubbard and beyond. It would seem that the immediate goal of the Black Brothers is to delay the Manifestation of the New Aeon, the birth of the magical child and the realization of the ubermensch through diversion of the Will-current into less than useless power plays, demoralizing materialist and superstitious delusions, New Age jargon, etc. The classic example in the Twentieth Century was the Nazi appropriation, under Black Lodge influence, of the very concept of the ubermensch, and sidetracking it into a pathetic racialist caricature of Nietzsche's super being.

"We should found society upon a caste of 'men of earth,' sons of the soil ..." said Crowley, "The worst thing they can do is what is done in America, to disenchant the man of earth with his destiny; to fill him with the facts and fancies that enthrall etiolated and degenerated idealists and unfit him for his evident purpose, that of supplying society with supermen." The Black Lodge in the Nazi era totally discredited the concept of the evolved human supermen by grafting it onto German nationalist and racialist conceits, while suppressing the Gnostic Church, the OTO, the Anthroposophical Society and even lost-word freemasonry -- in short, anyone who might have an actual understanding of the coming Being. The leading figure of the OTO in Germany, the future Grand Master Karl Germer, was placed in a concentration camp. His official crime was that he knew and maintained relations with Aleister Crowley. The Chief Bishop of the Universal Gnostic Church in France was executed by the Nazis. Crowley, for his part, "on the outbreak of the War ...was invited to see the Director of British Naval Intelligence."

According to Gerald Suster, "Crowley claimed that he advocated the use of two magical signs which were to boost British morale and frequently used by Winston Churchill: the 'V' sign, which, in magical terms, is the counter of the Swastika; and the ' Thumbs Up,' the Sign of the Phallus and Victory, which was published in a pamphlet of Crowley poetry during the most desperate days of 1940 and whose use spread throughout the nation." War of the magicians, indeed!

I believe the New Age distortion of the New Aeon concept is a direct attempt by the Black Lodge and its Inner Planes Rulers (which we call, for convenience VALIS) to delay manifestation of the Aeon by creating confusion among the receptive. Much of the "White Light Channeling" clearly bears the stamp of the Black Lodge and VALIS, an empty metaphysical blind of insipid psychic trivia. Many self-improvement groups have their origins in the ideas of failed magicians like L. Ron Hubbard. We have new age centers that teach nothing useful, UFO message-oriented cults waving flashlights on mountains, and, as I have shown end-of-the-world doomsayers touting this or that grand cosmic alignment, harmonic convergence or polar shift.

The UFO cults have clearly influenced even Kenneth Grant's so-called "Typhonian OTO," which appears to use valid magical currents to pursue the hideous old ones of H.P. Lovecraft's fictional Cthulhu Mythos. Phil Dick's last efforts were marred by insipid trivial UFO cult channelings -- the kind of stuff that was old hat to hardened UFOlogists by the late 1950s. Compare Phil Dick's musings in The Last Testament with, for example, the Mark Prophet or Dick Miller or Gloria Lee Bird materials of UFO contactee lore.

The magick of the Black Lodge can be defined and thus identified in only one way and by one set standard: the subversion of the True Will. This is the essence of Black Magick, and is its only true definition. Aleister Crowley explained it this way:

"The Magical Will is in its essence twofold, for it presupposes a beginning and an end, to will to be a thing is to admit you are not that thing.

"Hence to will anything but the supreme thing is to wander still further from it -- any will but that to give up the self to the beloved is black magick -- yet the surrender is so simple an act that to our complex minds it is the most difficult of all acts; and hence training is necessary ...

"The majority of the people in this world are ataxic; they cannot coordinate their mental muscles to make a purposed movement. They have no real will, only a set of wishes, many of which contradict others ...and at the end of life the movements cancel out each other..."

Crowley's references to his wars with the Black Lodge are scattered throughout his writings and bear further study. From these writings, one can come to understand that the form of the attack upon the magician can range from political repression to seduction.

The great magicians, Theosophists and other Western sources have devoted even more testimony to the other side of the coin -- the "Great White Brotherhood" or "The Secret Chiefs" or "The Masters." In the early days of the magical revival, the existence of an inner order was taken for granted. This was followed by a long epoch of expose, disillusionment and world weariness. But now, revisionist historians are finding evidence that these groups, usually described in mythic terms, are as material as they are archetypal. They are, in very Truth, the "Inner Order" -- in communication with and overlapping with Ultraterrestrial Sources.

The Reality of the Secret Chiefs

The mythology of the secret masters or chiefs and the myth of the black lodge form an archetypal substratum of modern magical lore which is almost a necessity if magick is not to drift into a kind of bland parapsychological secular humanism or offbeat psychology on the one hand, or a religious fundamentalism grounded in a new faith substituted for Christianity. But one should at least allow that the legend of secret chiefs may have some rather literal basis in fact; that there are high masters of the art scattered around the world, that they are in communication with one another, and that how they use their illumination depends upon their character and predisposition. This is all that one must grant to consider the great brotherhood, or secret chiefs, as well as their opposition plausible.

In medieval Tibet, this was known as the "whispered succession." It is an open part of the literature of Tantric Yoga, and the often-invoked Tibetan connection of adepts and publicists comes quickly to mind. It was the Hidden Church of Karl von Eckartshausen that brought Aleister Crowley to the path, and small wonder; von Eckartshausen wrote in the 18th century of

"...the society of the Elect, which has continued from the first day of creation to the present time; its members, it is true, are scattered all over the world, but they have always been united in the spirit and in one truth ...

"It is from her that all truths penetrate into the world, she is the School of the Prophets, and of all who search for wisdom, and it is in this community alone that truth and the explanation of all mystery is to be found. It is the most hidden of communities yet possesses members from many circles; of such is this School ...From all time, therefore, there has been a hidden assembly, a society of the Elect, of those who sought for and had capacity for light, and this interior society was called the interior Sanctuary or Church."

In medieval European graal mythology, we find a strain of accomplished Graal Templars going out in secret to govern and protect far-flung populations, but (as in von Eschenbach's Parzival), "...writing was seen on the Gral to the effect that any Templar whom God should bestow on a distant people for their lord must forbid them to ask his name or lineage, but must help them gain their rights ...members of the Gral Company are now forever averse to questioning, they do not wish to be asked about themselves..."

As magical mythologist Aleister Crowley has a wonderful time with both friend and foe in the fictional Moonchild, but his nonfictional recounting of the same period comes uncomfortably close to the metaphor of the war between the Great White Brotherhood and the Black Lodge. Then we find the matter of fact (if remarkable) essay on sexual magick, "Energized Enthusiasm," interrupted, as it were, in midcourse by an anecdotal accounting worthy of Moonchild.

"Thus far had I written when the distinguished poet, whose conversation with me upon the Mysteries had incited me to jot down these few rough notes, knocked at my door ...'If you come with me now, we will finish your essay.' Glad enough of any excuse to stop working, the more plausible the better, I hastened to take down my coat and hat. 'By the way,' he remarked in the automobile, 'I take it that you do not mind giving me the Word of Rose Croix.' I exchanged the secrets of I.N.R.I. with him..."

What followed was an account of a close encounter of a Most Peculiar Kind, best read in the original.

Crowley, ever both rationalist and mystic, was aware of the superficial difficulties in the idea of secret chiefs. Yet he tended to be rather unambiguous on this matter.

"Yes; this involves a theory of the powers of the Secret Chiefs so romantic and unreasonable that it seems hardly worth a smile of contempt...I propose to quote it here in order to show that the most ordinary events, apparently disconnected, are in fact only intelligible by postulating some such people as the Secret Chiefs..."

He remarks in this manner in his autobiography, but is still quite convinced 20 or so years later when he notes, in Magick Without Tears:

"They can induce a girl to embroider a tapestry, or initiate a political movement to culminate in a world-war; all in pursuit of some plan wholly beyond the purview or the comprehension of the deepest and subtlest thinkers...But are They men, in the usual sense of the word? They may be incarnate or discarnate: it is a matter of Their convenience..."

We should take note of Paul Johnson's recent trailblazing study of the theosophical masters. The essence may be boiled down to this: secret chiefs or hidden masters may have good reason to mythologize themselves, and encourage those in direct contact with them to follow suit on the border where magical philosophy meets with its political implications, the need for secrecy assumes a more practical rationale. The Secret Chiefs may be secret not because they are myths or immortals, but because they are neither.

Do the Gods Leave Footprints?

The recent revisionist histories, especially Paul Johnson's The Masters, Joscelyn Godwin's "hidden hand" articles, and our own work with the "ciphers of the Secret Chiefs" (identical with that of the UFOnauts) have begun to restore the political component to historical understandings of the magical revival of the late 19th century.
For Westerners, especially in America, the separation of Church and State has been sufficient to make it difficult even to think in terms of spirituality and political philosophy as a continuous sphere. Even hardcore Bible-belters are unable to truly imagine an established religion in the European sense, let alone in the Asiatic. I believe most of us have virtually no idea of what makes Islamic Republicanism tick, and we stand appalled not only at the atrocities of Islamic Government, but at its sheer zeal. The idea of Pat Robertson driving a truck filled with explosives into an enemy military compound shouting "Jesus is Lord!" is ludicrous in our imaginations. Put Billy Graham behind the wheel ... but you get the point.

Yet, it has been shown that the founders of speculative freemasonry in the 18th century, especially in its continental version, were upholders of a radical spiritual, sometimes republican political vision that captured the imagination of many, including early socialists on the one hand and occultists on the other. These tendencies meet and overlap, and explain much about the nature of Masonic and occult secrecy, the cell structure common to political radicals and occultists, and the hostility of the established State and Church to both.

The Secret Chiefs of Theosophy, the Golden Dawn and the OTO may be able to, as Crowley said, "initiate a political movement to culminate in a world-war" (or prevent one), but if Paul Johnson's thesis is correct, one should not conclude from this that they are immune to arrest, torture and execution. Alessandro di Cagliostro, almost certainly a (rather more public than would seem judicious) Secret Chief, was arrested and condemned by the Inquisition, dying in a Roman prison.

Johnson observes of some of his successors: "They were all committed to an international effort to combat religious dogmatism, extend the range of democratic government, and direct public attention to the values of liberty, equality and fraternity ...Sotheran's acquaintance with HPB began in Europe among the disciples of Mazzini. Sotheran's account of Cagliostro makes it clear that he regarded the work of Mazzini and the Carbonari to be direct continuation of Cagliostro's mission..."

Johnson's cast of characters in early Theosophical history overlaps with occultist-magical history considerably. The great Magi Papus, P.B. Randolph and John Yarker all come under consideration by Johnson.

But before we inaugurate Karl Marx or Anarchist Emma Goldman as "Secret Chiefs," we do need to avoid losing sight of the fact that those who professedly encountered these hidden beings were apt to describe them in terms of, at the least, superbeings in human form.

Consider Henry Steel Olcott's account of an encounter at Lahore with the legendary "K.H.":

"I was sleeping in my tent, the night of the 19th, when I rushed back towards external consciousness on feeling a hand laid on me. The camp being on the open plain, and beyond the protection of the Lahore police, my first animal instinct was to protect myself ...'Do you not know me? Do you not remember me?' It was the voice of the Master K.H. A swift revulsion of feeling came over me, I relaxed my hold on his arms, joined my palms in reverential salutation, and wanted to jump out of bed to show him respect. But his hand and voice stayed me, and after a few sentences had been exchanged, he took my left hand in his, gathered the fingers of his right into the palm, and stood quiet beside my cot, from which I could see his divinely benignant face by the light of the lamp ...Presently, I could feel some soft substance forming in my hand, and the next minute the Master laid his kind hand on my forehead, uttered a blessing, and left ...I found myself holding in my left hand a folded paper enwrapped in a silken cloth..."

The letter, as it turned out, predicted the death of two enemies of the Theosophical Society, which swiftly came to pass. The actual identity of "Master K.H." seems to be one Thakar Singh, an enlightened radical Sikh leader, in contact with the worldwide network of radicals of the 19th century.

Contrast Olcott's encounter with S.L. MacGregor Mathers' account of his relations with the Secret Chiefs:

"It was found absolutely and imperatively necessary that there should be some eminent Member especially chosen to act as the link between the Secret Chiefs and the more external forms of the Order. It was requisite that such a member should be me who, while having the necessary and peculiar educational basis of critical and profound Occult Archaeological Knowledge, should at the same time not only be ready and willing to devote himself in every sense to a blind and unreasoning obedience to those Secret Chiefs..."

Israel Regardie described Mathers' fateful encounter in this way:

"While walking in the Bois de Bologne one day, meditating ... Mathers claimed triumphantly that he was approached by three men. He asserted that these were Adepts belonging to the hidden or Secret Third Order, and therefore belonged to that category of men described in The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary. Apparently, so he claims, they had materialized themselves, and in that tense emotional and spiritual atmosphere of Psychical phenomena, confirmed him in the sole rulership of the Order."

Mathers observed that, for his part, "I believe they are human beings living on this Earth, but possessed of terrible and super- human powers."

As outre as these tales are, they coincide remarkably with close encounter accounts from as early as St. Paul's fateful experience on the road to Damascus, to Albert K. Bender's three Men in Black.

The most intelligent discussion of what is delusion, dishonesty and deception in all this, and what is not, is in Crowley's Magick Without Tears. That it is scattered through the work and written under an implicit assumption that the proofs of a residue of concrete reality, however bizarre, are readily obvious to the reader is unfortunate, in today's (properly) more wary magical and UFOlogical circles. All that we attempt to demonstrate here is that a plausible case can be made for historical revision at this time. Johnson's tentative identification of Theosophical Masters both demythologizes them and adds to the credibility of their existence. If Johnson is correct, the Secret Chiefs are not only real but they probably have phone numbers -- doubtless unlisted.

Crowley observed dryly in a postscript: "A visitor's story has just reminded me of the possibility that I am a Secret Chief myself without knowing it: for I have sometimes been recognized by other people as having acted as such, though I was not aware of the fact at the time."

Brad Steiger observed in 1988, that, apparently, "...Space Beings have placed themselves in the role of messengers of God, or that we, in our desperation for cosmic messiahs who can remove us from the foul situation we have made on this planet, hope that there are such messengers who can extricate us from the plight we have brought on ourselves." Only with the coming of cipher knowledge can we decode the Pretended Saviors from Authentic Benefactors or, better Allies. Taking into consideration that UFO contactee George King and his Aetherius Society are earnestly engaged in the war being waged by the (Great White) Brotherhood against the Black Magicians, a group they feel seeks to enslave the human race," as Steiger puts it, the UFOlogy mythos and the magical mythos are shown clearly to be cut from the same cloth. The nature of that cloth, in the hands of Crowley or King, is now no longer obscure.

 

Excerpt from:
Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts 1994
by Allen H. Greenfield ISBN 1-881532-04-6
Illuminet Press, P.O.B. 2808, Lilburn, GA 30226