‘They were actually here? On the ground?’
‘Out there.’ Miss White pointed past the bell tower to the misting horizon. ‘Living in their remote farm-workers’ cottages in the wilderness. Or up in Shropshire and Montgomeryshire. Perhaps in emulation of Hitler and Himmler in their rural retreats, looking down over mountains and forestry, drawing inspiration from the haunted hills and the legends. Dismal little fantasists.’
‘How many of them?’
‘Mere handful, I expect, but two hate-driven individuals on the Internet can be a virtual army. It’s what kind of influence they have. The power of their steaming rhetoric.’
‘What did they want from Rector?’
‘Some of them clearly wanted him to be their leader. He still had cachet. The more obvious ones who appeared up at Capel – identifiable by the kind of questions they asked at the end of his seminars – were given their money back and unceremoniously dispatched down the mountain.’
Merrily sat back, shaking her head.
‘Athena, either I’m not getting this or there’s something you’re not telling me. If they were on his courses, presumably they’d realize he wasn’t preaching Nazism. What was he doing up there that might lead them to suspect that he wasn’t a lost cause?’
They leaned into their separate corners of the bench, the Zimmer between them.
‘All right,’ Miss White said. ‘How much do you know about what’s become known – rather disparagingly, I suppose – as chaos magic?’
Not much, actually, but she could bluff for a while.
‘Free-range sorcery?’ Merrily said. ‘Pick ’n’ mix?’
‘For a person of the cloth,’ Miss White said, ‘you can be a frightfully crass little woman.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Although, I will admit to finding some of it – or at least the way it’s handled – to be superficial, haphazard, disrespectful and dangerous.’
‘Let me work this out. It’s a practice that rejects what you might call the confining disciplines of the past by following, in the most liberal sense, Aleister Crowley’s maxim, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Cabala and Catholicism, druidry and freemasonry, witchcraft, yoga, dianetics… if it works, toss it in the pot?’
‘You’re halfway there. Halfway to Peter Rector’s discipline, anyway. And discipline is the operative word. Performed correctly, what we’re talking about is the most disciplined form of magic. Bringing elements of different traditions together successfully requires a very sure touch.’
‘I can imagine. What I can’t imagine is why?’
‘It’s product based. A means to an end. The means tailored to the desired result. For example – during the war, a magical defence system was set up by Dion Fortune and a few others, based in Glastonbury. It had one central aim, which was to keep Hitler off British soil. A psychic wall erected around us. But within that central premise, different operations were mounted to challenge specific developments in the war. Now I’m not saying too many different occult methods were used to this end, but it was a project to which the principles of what we now call chaos magic might well have been applied. You identify exactly the result you’re after and you decide which combination will best achieve it. Yes?’
‘Has a weird logic,’ Merrily said.
‘However, it also gets carried away with the need to break rules. From the heretical merging of religion and magic comes a general breach of taboos. The energy of the perverse. You see where I’m going with this? Perhaps you don’t.’
‘Not sure.’
‘You don’t. All right… the Order of the Sun in Shadow write on their websites of the necessity of breaking human taboos, pushing the mind and body beyond accepted limits of behaviour. Performing acts regarded by society as hideous, in order to align themselves with perceived dark cosmic forces. The sublime shock of breaking civilization’s constraints releasing them into the next evolutionary stage.’
‘Satanism, in other words.’
‘Satanism only exists in the theology of your fundamentalist friends.’
‘I don’t have any fundamentalist friends. Let me get this right. I think what you’re saying is that the practices of modern extreme right-wing magical groups is developed from the same source as chaos magic, as practised by Peter Rector. Did he ever follow the other path?’
‘I think I’d have to say not intentionally. But he nevertheless pointed the way, and would never recover from the guilt.’
Miss White supported herself on the Zimmer, her small, pointed chin on her arms.