Private Eye

by Paul Kervale

"Tell me the story from the beginning."

"Don't you know everything already?"

"The question is what you know."

"Ok. It started with a pathworking on the 31st path. I did a quick banishing, sat, closed my eyes, and visualized the temple of Malkuth. I looked at my hands to bring my body of light into focus. Then I walked to the door to the 31st path. I visualized the door -- the tarot trump ‘Judgement,' set in a red arch -- and visualized it opening like a pair of double doors.

"After I stepped through, it took me a moment to get into the right waking dream state. I saw red with a bright circle in the middle. I was in a tunnel of fire. I flew down the tunnel and out into the air above a lake. There was a high cliff off to the right. An angel with flaming wings and a white robe stood at the shore of the lake. It was so bright I couldn't really look at it. I landed in front of the angel.

"I challenged the angel: 'Do you come in the name of Elohim?' The angel boomed, "I am Elohim!'

"I was pretty pleased with myself at this point. This was the most vivid vision I’d ever had."

Renny had been staring at the dingy office walls as he talked, but he turned back to the interviewer when he got a fleeting impression that the character had rolled his eyes. It could just have been that Renny's attention had been pulled back to the interviewer’s outrageous red moustache, which curved up around each side of his face all the way to the eyes. The mustachio tips spiraled around the eyes, forming ovals that were actually plastered to his eye sockets, like a bizarre pair of spectacles, or eye stalks.

"Did you want to say something?" Renny asked.

"No. Continue."

"Ok, well, so anyway, the angel stretched its wings, and a pillar of fire came down from the sky right on top of me. I started rising up into the fire. I got a little scared here because my skin actually started to feel like it was burning. I wondered what my roommate would do if he found a case of spontaneous human combustion in my bedroom.

"The fire disappeared and I was in a wide circular chamber with a very low ceiling. It was lit with a dim, orangish light. The ceiling was a little concave, with a dark hole in the middle, so that it looked like a giant eyeball staring down at me.

"That was when the second angel appeared. This one had no body -- it was just flurry of iridescent wings that constantly flexed and rotated in different directions. I challenged it: 'Do you come in the name of Elohim?' I heard 'Yes' in my mind, although no voice seemed to come directly from the angel. And just for a second, right after I challenged it, the wings opened up and it was like I was looking down a giant fleshy tube, like a throat. Then the wings covered up the tube again. I guess I should have paid more attention to that."

The interviewer nodded. "Yes."

"I kind of forgot about the throat thing because the angel, or whatever it was, showed me a vision. It said 'Behold' and I saw a golden sphere with a dot in the center. I understood that the dot was me. On the inside of the sphere was a view of rolling green hills with fruit trees -- like an ideal world. The angel said (in my head), 'This sphere is the boundary between you and the world. Do magic, and the world becomes this green paradise. You belong in this paradise.' I started to feel like I had to go, but it said, 'One more thing. If you ever want to call on me for guidance, evoke Elonath.' I saw hebrew letters blazing in  red in front of me: Aleph Lamed Nun Tav -- ALNTh.

"I returned to the Malkuth temple and opened my eyes. At first I was excited. I had been nervous about trying real magic, and I felt like I had been given permission. I also felt like I had made a real inner plane contact.

"But later, when I thought back on the hebrew name it had showed me, I realized that the lamed was backwards. I don't know Hebrew, but I've looked at enough tables of correspondences to tell when a Hebrew letter is backward. Also, Elonath's parting words had kind of a cheap sales pitch quality to them.

"That made the whole thing seem less, you know, magical, and I got distracted by other stuff, so I just forgot about it for a while.

"Then a couple of weeks later I was browsing in an occult bookstore and I saw this book, 'The Temple of the Solar Fields'. The cover had the sun symbol -- a dot in the middle of a circle -- superimposed on a photo of rolling green hills. The dot was actually a tunnel, leading to a point of light. The back cover described the Temple of the Solar Fields as a new magical order founded to bring new openness to the magical world. As I flipped through the book this sentence caught my eye: 'Elonath is the name of the egregore, or group spirit, of the Temple of the Solar Fields.'

"At first I just thought 'Huh, that's weird.' Thinking back, I can't believe I didn't freak out. I mean, after all those months of looking for some sort of confirmation that this stuff is real, I finally get it. And it just doesn't quite register. I think I must have blocked it out. Some part of me must have worried I was going crazy.

"I did buy the book, though, and that's how I met her. She was talking to the cashier, and when she saw the book she said, 'Oh hey, that guy is talking at Moonland in Bushwick next week. I think he's going to do some kind of workshop.' She was cute: she had on a Green Lantern t-shirt and a black satin mini-skirt. What is it about Brooklyn occultists and superhero shirts? Anyway, it looked good."

"Did she have a face?"

"Ha, yes. Very cute. Like a pixie, with Bettie Page hair."

"Did she have eyes?"

"Ok, ok. I get it. And before you ask me if she had a name, it was Erin. Anyway, I said, 'Oh yeah? You know, it's the weirdest thing. This egregore the book talks about...' I flipped to the page and showed her the name. 'It showed up in one of my pathworkings the other day.' I winced at how much like a poser I sounded, but I forgave myself pretty quickly when she took the bait.

"No frackin' way," she said. "Let's have it, then. The whole story."

"I really need a coffee. How about I tell you at the cafe next door." And we were off. The reality of the story still hadn’t sunk in. Talking about it was easier than believing it, especially since Erin seemed into it.

"We hit it off. She was pretty much at the same place I was with respect to occult stuff:  had done a lot of  reading and some experimentation, but hadn't joined any groups. She was more willing to dive into it than I had been, and that turned me on. We went back to my place to look at some books I was telling her about, and then we started talking about maybe trying sex magic. In the end we skipped the magic and went straight to sex.

"After she left the next morning, I started reading the Solar Fields book. At first I fantasized about both of us joining the order and becoming a magical power couple. But when I actually dug into the book, it started to give me the creeps. It talked a lot about awakened people and unawakened people. That's normal for occult books, but here it used words like "shadows" and "illusions" to describe unawakened people. It implied not just that the unawakened weren't fully aware, but also that on some level they didn't even exist. The only real beings were apparently initiates who learned to occupy the center of the solar sphere and become the creator of their own pocket universe.

"It was close to standard magical philosophy, but it bent it just a little too far in a bad direction. The combination of the self-help pitch with this dark undertone left me feeling gross when I put down the book.  I went out and tried to forget about it.

"I had meant to call Erin that night, but the thought of calling her reminded me of my fantasy of joining the Temple of the Solar Fields with her, and that made me shudder. I felt like I had dodged a bullet. So I put off calling her. Four days later she called me. I let the machine get it and heard her leaving her message, 'Hey Renny this is Erin. I'm going to that talk by the Solar Fields guy. I thought I'd see if you were up for it. Give me a call back.'

"I was glad I hadn't picked up. The last thing I wanted to do was get more exposure to Solar Fields crap. I did a banishing ritual and sold the book to a used book store. I forgot about the Solar Fields, and tried to forget about Erin.

"Then, three months later, I saw her at a bar. She had the sun symbol (circle with a dot) tatooed on her forearm, and she looked terrible. She was pale, with bags under her eyes, and looked drained. She was sitting alone at the bar so I sat down next to her. When she first saw me she looked angry for a second, but then she took a drink and seemed fine. I said, 'Sorry about bagging on that Solar Fields talk. The book really turned me off of that group.'

"'Oh?' she answered. 'The talk was amazing, so I took initiation.' At first I thought 'Oh shit, I can't believe I almost got involved with someone who could go for that crap.' But there was something in her voice that made me pause. She was defensive (I was dissing her order, after all), but also unsure. She clearly had doubts. 'Your pathworking gave them some real cred, after all,' she said. 'And I've experienced some pretty amazing shit since I joined.'

"Then, in flash, I saw it. I had never seen auras or anything like that before, but for half a second I saw her surrounded by a kind of egg-shaped field of sickly green-brown light. At the top of the egg the light was flowing into a stream that turned pure black and wound away into the air above her like a thick cord or tentacle.

"I felt pretty sure that auras were not suppose to look like that. I also felt pretty sure that she wasn't aware of it, and that she would get even more defensive if I tried to tell her that I had just developed psychic powers and that my powers told me she was in danger. I was also fairly freaked out about the fact that I did seem to have just developed psychic powers.

"I didn't know what to do, so I said 'Ok, well, great to see you', and left. But I was scared for her.

"The whole next week I had nightmares. I couldn't get a good night's sleep. I couldn't stop thinking about what I saw.

"I needed advice. So I went back to the 31st path, and asked for help. On entering the gate to the path I saw the same lake and cliffs, but no angel. I was hovering in mid-air. I said,  'In the name of Elohim, I ask for a guide.'

"I was pulled down to the base of the cliff. There was a path on a narrow ledge that angled up the face of the cliff, so I started up it. I saw now that a long row of identical gigantic statues of robed figures had been carved into the cliff side to my right. Each figure had huge eyes that looked straight down on the path. I trudged up the path for a while, past many statues, until I saw a door in the side of the cliff, between two of the giant figures. It was completely out of place: a plain office door, with a pane of opaque glass in its top half. The words 'Private Eye' were written on the glass. Below the words was a picture of a magnifying glass with a giant eyeball looking through it.

"I opened the door, and there you were, sitting behind your desk there."

Renny paused, waiting for a response.

"And?" asked the interviewer.

"And?" Renny responded, puzzled.

"What did you see? Describe me."

"Um, I saw a big, burly redheaded man. You wore a white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up over enormous biceps. And of course you had this crazy mustache that looped up around your eyes."

"Thank you for noticing.  Did you challenge me?"

"Yes, I said, 'Do you come in the name of Elohim?' You nodded and said 'Yes.'"

"Did my appearance change at all?"

"Nooo..."

"Excellent."

"Then you asked me what you could do for me, and I said I needed help. And you said 'Tell me the story from the beginning.' Which I did. So does this mean you are my guide? Can you help?"

"I am your guide. Whether I can help depends on what you want help with."

"I want to help Erin escape from whatever it is I saw. That thing attached to her aura. And I think that means getting her away from Solar Fields."

"That is correct. Yes, I can help."

"So what was that thing?"

"That thing was ALNTh, a nasty character in the neighborhood. A predatory egregore. Through an unfortunate series of workings designed to increase Solar Fields recruitment, the Solar Fields group spirit assumed an independent life and developed interests opposed to those of the group's members. Imagine the egregore of a pyramid scheme."

Renny felt again the sense of having dodged a bullet, before he remembered that helping Erin meant going within Elonath's sphere of influence.

The guide said, "That's right -- you aren't as clear here as you think you are. You made contact, and you put Erin in touch with it. You are linked with her now."

"So what can I do? Is this where we raid the cult headquarters and rescue the girl?"

"No." The guide stared at Renny for a moment. Then he pulled open a drawer. From across the desk Renny couldn't see into much of the drawer. He thought he saw a glint of steel -- a revolver. But what the guide pulled out of the drawer was a painting. He held it up in front of Renny. It showed ten eyeballs arranged in a triangle on an olive green background. Each eyeball had what looked on first glance like a gash. Closer inspection revealed that each eyeball actually had a mouth, with slightly parted lips. One or two black tendrils snaked out of each mouth. Except for the eyeball at the top of the triangle, every eyeball was pierced by one of the tendrils snaking down from above. A line of red fire cut across the bottom of the triangle, separating the bottom row of eyeballs from the rest.

"Can you see this clearly?" the guide asked.

"Ugh. A little too clearly."

"Good. Make a physical copy of this image when you emerge from this pathworking. Charge it as you would charge a sigil. Then show it to Erin."

"This sounds like a magical attack. Isn't that bad karma?"

"Any effort on behalf of the health of a Solar Fields member will be an attack on ALNTh. There will be repercussions. There are always repercussions. Inaction would also have consequences."

"Am I trying to control Erin's mind here?"

"No. This working aims to free her long enough for her to make her own decision."

"Ok."

"Courage! Time to go." The office door swung open behind Renny. He left the office, retraced his path back to the door to the Malkuth temple, sat in the chair in the middle of the temple, and opened his eyes. It took him a few seconds to bring his mind back to his tiny, book-stuffed room.

For the moment he made himself forget what he was about to do and just focused on capturing the image the guide had shown him. He sketched it quickly in his journal, and then got out a small canvas board and tempera paints he had left over from an old art class. Within an hour he had a crude painting of the image. While it dried he called Erin and left a message on her machine.

"Hi Erin, this is Renny. Listen, I really need to see you. Can we meet?"

He sat and thought about what to do next. He found himself coming up with reasons to wait, reasons to question the advice or authenticity of the guide. Shouldn't he leave Erin to pursue her own destiny?

He realized that if he didn't do the working soon he’d never do it. So he performed a banishing and sat down on the floor to charge the painting.

He propped the painting up against a stool in front of him, facing away from him. Then he meditated. He was so anxious that t took him close to half an hour to still his mind. But he kept letting thoughts go as they arose, until finally his mind was clear and blank. Then he flipped the painting around and stared at it, pushing his attention into it until it seemed that the image punched through the mundane world, extending back in some hidden direction. He held the image there for a few seconds as it burned with heightened reality, and then he flipped the painting back around and released the image from his mind.

The phone rang just as he was relaxing, making him jump. He grabbed it. "Hello?"

"Renny, this is Erin. Why did you leave this weird message?"

"I...I have a present for you."

"You have a present for me? You don't call me after we hook up, you give me the cold shoulder when you run into me, and now you have a present for me? What kind of freak are you?"

She didn't sound like someone whose life force was being drained by a predatory spirit. For a moment he thought he had made a terrible mistake, and almost hung up. But the image was charged -- he had launched the working. He had to go through with it.

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry. Look, this isn't about you and me. I've learned some things about Solar Fields that you need to know. Can we meet, just to talk?"

There was silence on the other end. "Hello?" he said.

"Ok," she answered.

They arranged to meet in at a coffee shop that evening. She was waiting at a corner table when he arrived.

"Hey," he said.  She crossed her arms and just looked at him.

He sat. "I want to show you something."  He took the painting out of his backpack and slid it across the table to her.

"So this is your 'gift'?" she asked. He nodded. She picked it up and looked at it. Her brow furrowed, and for a moment it looked like something about the image registered with her. But she slid it back to him.

"Keep it. You said you had information about Solar Fields."

"Yeah. So I went back to the 31st path and asked for a guide..."

"Wait. You hauled me out here to tell me about another one of your stupid pathworkings?"

"I saw..."

"Save it. I can do my own pathworkings." She got up and left. He couldn't very well shout after her "I saw a black tentacle sucking energy out of your aura" in a crowded cafe, and it would be humiliating to chase after her. People were already looking at him. But she had seen the image, so he had followed the guide's instructions. He let it go, went home and slept.

The next day it occurred to him that maybe he should worry about magical attacks. What if Erin knew that the painting was a working? What if she reported it back to her order and they struck back at him?

But he couldn't actually bring himself worry about it. The possibility felt like a remote fantasy. Maybe the whole guide thing had been a fantasy. Erin's open contempt had certainly opened that possibility for him in a way he couldn't ignore. Maybe the vision of the tentacle had just been a by product of all the pathworking and visualization he had been doing -- maybe he was getting too good at making himself hallucinate. He obsessed over the working for a few weeks, but eventually it faded in importance for him. It just wasn’t a live issue any more. Eventually he filed the whole episode under "weird things that have happened since I started messing with magic."

Then a couple of months later he heard the clerk at Moonland talking with a customer about Solar Fields.

"Did you hear that Solar Fields is disintegrating?" Renny pretended to keep reading the book he was holding.

"Didn't Erin take initiation in Solar Fields?" the customer asked.

"Yeah. She told me she thought she was being psychically vampirized by the senior members. Then apparently she talked to some of the other recent members of the New York temple, and they all left as a group. After that some of the higher level people started leaving too. Now it looks like the original Chicago temple is going to fall apart too."

It was real. Not only were his visions validated, but his working had been effective. Erin had broken free. She was safe. Maybe now she understood what he had been trying to do for her. He remembered their night together and thought maybe they could have more nights together. Maybe they could be a magical power couple after all. Maybe they could found their own order.

As soon as he got home he called her. She picked up after the first ring.

"Erin, this is Renny."

"Renny, I'm glad you called."

"I heard you brought down Solar Fields."

"Ha, yeah, I guess so. They were a bad scene. I see now that you were trying to tell me that, in your own weird way. I'm sorry for the way I acted the last time I saw you."

"I'm just glad you're free from them. Listen -- do you want to get dinner tonight?"

There was a long silence.

"Renny, I really appreciate what you tried to do for me, and I know this is unfair of me, but the Solar Fields thing was pretty nasty, and I kind of associate you with it in my mind. If I saw you I think it would just remind me of the whole business, and I need to move past it now. You know?"

"Sure, I completely understand." Of course I understand, he thought. It’s exactly how I felt about you a few months ago.

"But I owe you one, and if you're ever in a jam and I can help you, give me a call, OK?"

"OK. Will do."

"Take care of yourself Renny." She hung up.