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The Smoking Mirror

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Miranda Raven

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Sep 11, 1994, 8:26:24 PM9/11/94
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Copyright Miranda Raven 1994.

This version released on the Internet on 5/5/94. Permission is
granted to make personal copies of this material, and it may be
freely circulated in electronic form so long as this trailer remains
intact. Publication or sale of this material without the written
permission of the author is expressely forbidden.

Miranda Raven (Inet: mir...@raven.win-uk.net)

*********************************************************************

THE SMOKING MIRROR

Our researches into ritual magic were not something Vivienne and
I discussed with our mentor. He taught us what he considered to be
necessary and in keeping with our understanding; anything more he
considered to be dabbling, and unwholesome dabbling at that. This
did not satisfy me. Vivienne and I shared that feline instinct which
drives the poor creatures to explore under the floorboards, on top of
the wardrobe, and inevitably ends with yowling and scratching on the
wrong side of the attic trapdoor after the step-ladder has been
returned to the cupboard. We experimented with invocation and
evocation, and were more often saved from the consequences of our
practical experiments by incompetance than by caution. The
trail which led us to the smoking mirror began with my researches
into to magical world of Dr. John Dee.
Dr. John Dee was an Elizabethan scholar with an
international reputation. He was an expert on most of the known
sciences, Astrologer Royal to Queen Elizabeth the First, and he
combined his travels around the European royal households with
some surreptitious spying for his queen. In common with most
scholars of the late sixteenth century he took for granted the notion
that there is an occult mechanism within the body of the divine which
sustains the creation, a mechanism mediated through a hierarchy of
subordinate powers - angels and the like. Like any mechanism it
could be tinkered with; all done in the name of God, of course, with
the most humble and devout supplications, prayers, and pious
breast-beating, but tinkered with none-the-less. The keys to this
tinkering were secret names of power, names woven into the fabric of
existence like a monogram on a dandy's silk handkerchief. The letters
of these wonderful names had been scattered about, hidden where they
were least likely to be recognised for what they were: on the pages
of books. The fiery letters of God's secret name were mixed with
ordinary printers' type so that only an eye trained in the
permutational gymnastics and cunning guises of the celestial alphabet
could ferret them out. Armed with the secret names and invocations of
the powers, which regulate the secret world behind the world, the
magician could, working like a spotty boy wonder on a computer
console, meddle with the machinery of the universe.
Dr. John Dee spent years communicating with angels, spirits
and intelligences through the mediumship of a scoundrel called
Edward Kelly. Despite a lifelong fascination with the occult
mechanisms of the creation, Dee appears to have had little
ability at scrying in a crystal or mirror, and he was dependent
on Kelly's dubious talent for scrying. Kelly gazed into a magic
mirror, or a crystal, and described the various beings who
appeared to him, while Dee asked the questions and kept a record
of the answers. In this way they received a long series of
communications in the language of the angels, which they called
Enochian after the Biblical sage Enoch, who was taken by God to
become Metatron, his chief executive officer, the Archangel of
the Presence. These communications were so potent that the angels
dictated them backwards to Kelly, lest the mere process of
transcription caused havoc in the celestial realms, and the
angels obliged Dee and Kelly by providing a translation of the
celestial tongue. Here is an extract from The Call of the Thirty
Aethyrs:

"...And let there be no creature upon or within her
one and the same.
All her members, let them differ in their qualities,
And let there be no one creature equal with another.
The reasonable creatures of the Earth, or Man,
Let them vex or weed out oneanother and their dwelling
places.
Let them forget their names.
The work of Man and his pomp let them be defaced,
His buildings let them become caves
For the beasts of the field.
Confound her understanding with darkness. For why?
It repenteth me that I have made Man...."

The magician Aleister Crowley called this the original curse on
the Creation.

I had borrowed a facsimile copy of Meric Casaubon's "A
True and Faithful Relation of What Passed between Dr. John Dee and
Some Spirits", and attempted to read it while hunched in front of a
three-bar electric fire during an extremely cold spell in
January. When Vivienne and I had inspected the flat during the
previous summer we had fallen in love with the lofty ceilings, the
original ornamental cornices and white plaster ceiling roses, the Art
Nouveau fireplaces, and the vast spaciousness of the rooms. It was
easy to ignore the fact that it had not been decorated since the
Second World War, and we completely forgot about heating the
place. Only one room had a heater, an antiquated three bar
electric fire, so we abandoned the cavernous bedrooms and the lounge
and lived in the little room adjacent to kitchen. When I wanted to
go through to my bedroom I wore my coat, my gloves, and my scarf.
"Cassandra, I can't stand much more of this." Vivienne said
on an extremely frosty Sunday morning as we jostled for carpet in
front of the fire. "My face feels like the surface of Mercury -
roasted on one side and frozen on the other." She was wearing
two jumpers, leg warmers, miser mittens, and an
uncomfortable expression. "Can't we go somewhere to get warm?"
"We could look for John Dee's magic mirror."
"Where is it then?"
"I'm sure I read somewhere that it's in the British Museum,
but I don't know where I read about it."
"Would it be in your book there?" She was referring to "A
True and Faithful Relation".
"Oh don't be daft! The British Museum wasn't even built when
this was published."
"So you're not really sure whether the mirror is there or
not?"
"I *am* sure they heat the place."
"Right, let's go then."

The British Museum occupies an entire block of Bloomsbury, and
we arrived at the North Entrance with no idea where to begin looking.
I had spent two hours previously in the museum, on a day when a photo
session was delayed because the clothes I was supposed to wear were
stuck in a huge traffic jam at Hammersmith, but I had seen little more
than the foyer, and Vivienne had never been there at all, so we spent
an abortive hour wandering around the Oriental galleries, the Japanese
prints, and lost ourselves in the Egyptian galleries.
"I'm going to ask that attendent." Vivienne announced
decisively. She looked puzzled when she returned.
"He suggested we try the special collections."
"And where are they?"
"They could be that way." She pointed to the left. "But they
might be this way." She pointed to the right. "This reminds me of my
holiday in Greece: each time I asked for directions, the person would
point vaguely in one direction and nod vaguely in the opposite
direction."
"So which way do we go?"
"Let's go that way."
We went left.
"Perhaps it's something to do with being invaded," I
speculated. "Whenever a Persian or a Byzantine or a Turk or a
German asked a Greek for the direction to Athens, the Greek would
point in one direction and nod in the opposite direction...its a
cultural adaption to having your country used as a perpetual billet
for a succession of foreign armies. Like in this country, when we
removed all the signposts during the war."
After half-an-hour Vivienne asked another attendent.
"This is strange," she announced on her return, "Maybe all
the attendants are Greek."
I have vivid memories of clocks. Every path seemed to lead
back to the clocks, and we passed and re-passed the same baroque
timepieces, noting as we went the passing of the hours. The
Museum suffers from topological hysteria somewhere along its
Eastern edge, and every attempt to find a passage from North to
South dumped us in the room with the clocks, a horological prison
where the tortured inmate is forced to meditate on the infinite
sub-divisions of every lingering second. Asking the attendants
for help did not help; no matter how we interpreted their
directions, we ended up watching the slow sweep of the same pendulum
we had seen several times before. All we needed was a pit, and our
torture would have been complete.
"They're all Greeks, I'm convinced of it." Vivienne sighed,
as she sat down on a bench in the room with the clocks.
"Perhaps it's a plot to steal back the Elgin Marbles," I
suggested. "The Greek Secret Service is infiltrating the museum
staff."
"My feet hurt."
"I thought those shoes were really comfortable."
"They're not too bad." Her voice lacked conviction. "They
don't really support my arches properly."
Vivienne bought too many pairs of shoes. She would return to
the flat on a Thursday evening after an impulsive spree of late-
night shopping in the West End, and announce that she had bought
a pair of shoes, and these shoes were so *wonderfully* comfortable.
Until the first time she wore them in anger that is, and then they
would join the rest of the shoes piled high in her wardrobe. I feel
that Vivienne's tireless search for the Holy Grail of footware will
end badly. Some day she will walk past a shoe shop, see the genuine
object of her quest, and be so consumed by the vision that like Sir
Galahad, she will drop dead on the pavement.
My feet were agony, but that was a necessary sacrifice. I was
going through my Juliet Greco phase, and I would not have worn
comfortable shoes outside of an officially designated national park.
We sat in the room of clocks, surrounded by ticks and tocks,
and clacking escapements which mocked us by offering no chance of
escape, and watched a ball-bearing roll on an endless path through
the hours, an activity we were close to emulating. It was
a hypnotising clock. A ball-bearing rolled on a flat metal bed
with a switchback groove in it. The ball rolled down the groove
from one side to the other, tripped a catch, tilted the table,
then went off in the opposite direction. I watched the ball
bearing roll back and forwards, my face a catatonic mask of
failure, while Vivienne slumped on the bench with her feet
protruding into the space between exhibits; every so often
someone would trip over her legs. She seemed completely
immovable, as if her body was the bottom of an hour-glass which
had run out, leaving her as solid and heavy as a sandbag.
"I'm going to ask that attendent," I said. "He doesn't look
like a Greek."
"He's probably had plastic surgery," Vivienne muttered
dourly.
The man in question had iron-grey hair, an iron-grey
moustache, and the air of a retired sergeant-major. He made his
uniform *look* like a uniform. He was clearly one of the last
bulwarks holding back the tide of Grecian infiltration. This was a
man who could be relied upon to stand against the Turks without
resorting to unmanly subterfuge and multidirectional nods. I asked
him the question.
"I'm sorry love," he replied with authority, "You're in the
wrong place. You should try the Victoria and Albert."
"He says we should try the V and A." I told Vivienne.
"Oh brilliant! We'll never get to South Kensington before it
closes. We might as well go home."
I had had enough of mummies, Egyptian grave goods, Assyrio-
Chaldean jewelry, boxwood reliquaries, Celtic torcs and
reconstructed pottery from every time and culture. I had had
enough of clocks. Whenever I closed my eyes, brass gears clicked
against rocking brass teeth. We left to go home.
We passed the display case containing John Dee's magical
apparatus on our way out, in a small section of the museum
devoted to collections of personal possessions. The black
obsidian mirror was there, next to its worn leather case. There
was a small quartz crystal ball and thick, white wax pantacles
inscribed with geometric designs and Enochian names - I had seen the
designs in Causabon's book. There was a little square of beaten
gold inscribed with the four watchtowers of the elements. I read the
note which has been handed down with the mirror; the author of the
note speculates that the mirror is Aztec in origin.
"It's beautiful!" Vivienne murmered.
"What is?" I wondered.
"The design on the big wax disk."
"It's the Sigillum Dei Aemeth." I said.
"What?" she asked abstractly.
"It's described in Causabon...the book I borrowed from Mark.
The design was given to Kelly by the archangel Uriel."
"I wonder if it's planetary?" she frowned, bending over to peer
at it through the glass.
"Why do you think that?"
"Well, a heptagon, a seven sided interlace star, another
heptagon, and a pentagram. Anything with seven in is usually
planetary."
"Unless it's seven of something else."
"Like what?"
"I don't know...the Magnificent Seven, Snow White and the Seven
Dwarves, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Seven-Up, the Seven Sisters,
the Seven Samurai...."
"So in amongst the inscriptions we ought to be looking for an
anagram of Yul Brynner?"
"And the guy in the Seven who played Napoleon Solo in 'The Man
from Uncle'," I added, "The cowardly one who Comes Good in the End."
"Robert Vaughn?"
"Yes...him."
"The names are a bit odd though, aren't they?" Vivienne mused,
Perhaps they *are* anagrams...I can't see a single name I recognise.
.....How do you spell Brynner?"
"I think the names are written in Enochian," I said, trying
to find the best angle for looking into the black obsidian mirror.
"So perhaps the thing is planetary after all, but I thought the
pentagram at least was elemental."
"Well it is, sort of, but the fifth point is spirit, so
you've got the four elements combined with spirit, which gives
you living matter as opposed to dead matter."
"What's dead matter then?" I wondered.
"The equal armed cross."
"Of course....so the pentagram could stand for microcosm, and
the seven sided thingies are the macrocosm?"
Vivienne shrugged. "It's all guesswork...I really haven't the
foggiest idea."
We stood in silence for several minutes. I do not know what
Vivienne was doing, but I attempted to scry in the black obsidian
mirror. People brushed past, and their reflections in the glass of
the display case distracted me, but I looked into the worn depths of
the centuries-old mirror. Something connected, responded to my
contact.
"What is it? What are you doing?" Vivienne asked suddenly.
"Looking in the mirror."
"You were scrying, weren't you?"
"Yes," I admitted.
"Let me have a look."
We changed places, and Vivienne had her turn.
"There's something there." she concluded.
"It's easy to imagine something..."

"Mirror, Mirror in the case,
What do you think of Vivienne's face?"

"Oh very funny. Well, the mirror is still in one piece, so the
spirits can't be too unhappy."
I want it!" I said petulantly. "I want it..I want it. We could
steal it."
"What for?"
"I don't know....it's Dee's magic mirror...we could talk to the
Angels in Enochian....backwards of course, you have to talk to the
angels backwards because the angelic speech is so powerful."
Vivienne frowned. "So that's why people say the Lord's Prayer
backwards? The forwards version isn't the right way round, and
Satanists have been doing it properly all along?"
"If we knew when the Greeks were planning to steal the Elgin
Marbles," I wondered, continuing my kleptomaniac line of thought, "We
could sneak in with the gang, half-inch the mirror, and while the
police were turning over half of the kebab shops in London in the
search for the lost marbles, we could be sitting at home asking the
archangel Uriel whether he had established just how many angels *can*
dance on the head of a pin. I mean, just think what it would do to
philosophy and theology if you could *ask* an archangel...none of the
endless debate about what is the Good, or what is Truth. It was Greeks
who started all this fruitless philosophical wrangling - they owe it to
us to help us get the mirror so we can put a stop to it!"
I lurched slightly as a yellow-grey feeling of nausea swept over
me. "I don't feel well."
I sat down with a bump on a bench opposite the display.
"What's the matter?" Vivienne wanted to know, suprised at
the suddeness of my attack.
"I feel dizzy...I think I'm going to be sick....it must have
been that liver pate I had for lunch."
"We'd better try to find a toilet."
"For God's sake don't ask an attendant!" I gasped, gulping
down my saliva, "Life isn't long enough...."
"Can you walk?"
"Yes."
We found a toilet, and I leaned over the bowl and waited for my
lunch to return. The nausea faded slowly, so I gave up waiting for my
lunch and we left the museum. Vivienne drove us home.
Later the same evening Vivienne started a migraine, retired
early to bed , and stayed at home on the next day to recover. She
has intermittent migraines, so I thought nothing of it, and went to
work.

Perception is most strange. Seeing is as instantaneous as the
speed of light, but the synthesis of perception into a structure of
meaning is not at all instananeous. It is as if there are some things
perceived which rise up through the layers of the mind like bubbles in
a thick syrup, and when a bubble finally bursts - days, weeks, or
even months after an event - there is a tendency to dismiss the
outburst of feelings as irrational, perhaps failing even to recognise
the cause. My body knew why it had felt sick - bodies usually do. My
stomach does not let go of my lunch without a good reason, and when it
does, it usually knows what food to blame. Throughout the day after
our visit to the museum I was troubled by a growing conviction that
the obsidian mirror had made me feel ill, and the more I tried to
persuade myself that the real problem was liver pate, the more my
stomach insisted it was the mirror.
I don't like to dramatise this sort of thing. It isn't
healthy to go about finding complex metaphysical causes for events
which are quite ordinary. This makes no sense, I thought. Why? Why the
mirror? Hang on, my body said....I have more bubbles on the way up.
Just wait a while....there's enough material here for a good dream..."
There was no sign of Vivienne when I arrived home in the
evening. I found her in bed, curtains pulled, hidden completely
under the bedclothes. I sat on the end of the bed.
"How are you feeling?"
"Horrible." she groaned.
"I've been thinking," I started hesitantly, "I think it was
the mirror."
"Yes," she replied in a small voice.
"You think it was the mirror?"
"Yes...oh Cassandra, I can't think. My head feels like it's
going to explode."
I patted the amorphous lump under the bedclothes.
"Can I get you anything? Is there anything you want?"
"A quick death."

I did not have an opportunity to talk to Vivienne until the
following evening. She had spent another day at home, and I when
I came back I found her dressed in layers of woolies, sketching on
the floor with her bum in the air in front of the electric fire. I
tried to see what she was doing, but she put the sketchbook face down
on the carpet.
"Can I see?"
Her expression told me she prefered otherwise.
"Go on." I pleaded.
She turned the sketchbook over and turned away from it in
denial like Pilate. It was covered in incomplete pencil drawings of
carnivorous horror, as if she had tried to distill the essence of
every predatory creature and weld the poisons, the jaws and teeth,
the claws and pincers, the traps and snares, the juices of
decomposition and digestion, into an abstract composite of something
which existed to consume life. It was worse than anything the Dark
Angel keeps in his kennels: Death and Life have a gentlemanly
understanding of each another. This thing honoured no agreements - it
wanted to grow to swallow God and his throne. I was utterly repelled
by it. I had been repelled and disgusted by horror films, but the
drawing was worse, because Vivienne had the power to bring the horror
to life. Whatever it was she had tried to draw, she had touched it. It
moved in her.
"I had some horrible dreams yesterday." she said in
justification, avoiding my eyes. I took off my coat and went to
make some tea. After a moment she followed me through to the
kitchen.
"Have you wondered why Dee used an Aztec mirror?" she asked.
"No?"
"I went to the library today."
"So?" I wondered, looking for the tea-bags.
"The Aztecs had a demonic god of the four quarters called
Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca was the god of sorcery and black magic -
his symbol was a black obsidian mirror. His name literally means
"Smoking Mirror"."
"What?"
"The mirror we saw on Sunday was an Aztec sorcerer's scrying
mirror."
"Demons are just someone else's angels..." I replied without
conviction.
Did you know," she continued, "That twenty thousand
prisoners were sacrificed in four days at the consecration of the
great temple of the Aztec sun god Huitzilopochtli." She fumbled the
pronounciation. "They used eight teams of priests to tear the hearts
out of the victims' chests with obsidian knives. They thought the
sun was thirsty and needed red cactus juice to keep going."
"Cactus juice?"
"Blood."
"I wonder if Dee knew..." I thought out loud.
"Of course he did! Aztec scrying mirrors aren't the sort of
thing you find at the local corner shop, are they?" Vivienne glared
at me with her grey eyes, defying me to argue.
"So all that Enochian stuff..."
"Exactly."
"Good grief...." I took my tea and sat down in the other
room.
"I was wondering where he got the mirror from." Vivienne
said, challenging me to jump ahead to her answer.
"The Spaniards pillaged huge amounts of stuff from Mexico." I
answered after a few seconds thought, "And English privateers
helped themselves to a fair share of the loot from the
Spaniards....England must have been full of looted Spanish
treasure." I looked at Vivienne, and she shrugged her shoulders
before replying.
"It wasn't what you would call treasure. Who would want to
carry a piece of black glass across the Atlantic unless they knew
exactly what it was. I don't think it reached England by
accident. I'm sure Dee knew what it was."
I looked at the drawings on the floor as I sipped my tea. A
"True and Faithful Relation" was sitting on the table where I had left
it the previous night. I thought about red cactus juice, about gutted
bodies tumbled down the steps of a Mexican pyramid, about jaws
and teeth snapping at the throne of God, and about standing over a
toilet bowl in the British Museum wishing I could be properly sick.
Bubbles popped on the stormy surface of my mind. Yes, my body said,
that's right, you've got it right now. I had learned something, but
I did not know what - the censor in my head had inked over all the
truely nasty bits. Some of the glamour of High Magic had rubbed off;
the looking-glass world was not what it seemed.

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