An Encounter with Chicago’s Black Magic Theosophic Neo-Pythagorian Gnostic Master

by John Fleming

First published in Neighbourhood News, 1979

Even though Aleister Crowley lived for a while during the 1920s in a studio apartment off Belmont Harbor, and despite the theme of a book published some time ago called Psychic City: Occult Chicago, Center of the Universe, Michael Bertiaux isn’t overly impressed with the mystical atmosphere around here. “I don’t really believe that Chicago is a biomagnetic center,” he said the other day. This is bad news for the local gurus who say the city is built above the ruins of ancient Atlantis, but it’s probably true, because Bertiaux knows about such things. Not only a veteran time-traveller in “the dimensionless gaps between universes” and “the icy realms of nothingness called Meon,” Bertiaux also has a “trans-yuggothian transmission station” set up in his high-rise apartment on South Michigan Avenue; he claims to use it for direct astral communication with “the space adepts, sothyrii, genii, and Voodoo Bon-Pa spirits.”

Bertiaux calls himself a Voodoo Gnostic Master, but he doesn’t resemble those movie characters who favor slinky black outfits and elaborate Egyptian fertility bracelets that suggest a certain interest in bondage and domination. Instead, wearing a baggy sport shirt and constantly fussing with his spectacles, he looks like a mild-mannered social worker, which in fact he is. Since 1966 Bertiaux has worked as a caseworker and supervisor at the state social service office in Woodlawn. “Most successful” according to Bertiaux, who 15 years ago left his job in Seattle as minister in an Episcopalian church (”a country club on its knees, a box lunch with religion thrown in for dessert”) and went to Haiti for instruction in the Cult of the Black Snakes. After settling in Chicago, he formed the Neo-Pythagorean Gnostic Church. “You might say that I am the bishop for the Chicago area,” said Bertiaux, who has about 100 followers across the country with whom he conducts voluminous correspondence. To qualify as one of Bertiaux’s correspondents, “You need to have read as much Husserl and Jung as I have, which means everything they ever wrote. You also need to know Wittgenstein and Cassirer, a German who was the ‘in’ thing when I was coming up in philosophy, and you also need to have read a lot of Hegel.” Bertiaux actually sees his followers only occasionally-at the five weekend seminars he holds yearly at the downtown Midland Hotel, and on the expeditions he leads from time to time to a deserted lake in Wisconsin that he considers a “power zone” for “the Deep Ones” whose “point of entry to the earth-plane” lies within the lake.

Bertiaux’s style is soothing enough-he speaks softly and hesitates precisely between each sentence-but a little elusive. Over lunch last Sunday he held court at a table in the back of a Greek restaurant on Clark Street with some of his biggest fans-three young men from a small town north of London who stayed in Chicago with him for two weeks this month. Several years ago, after reading about Bertiaux, the Englishmen had begun exchanging letters with him, and now they were here to go through a mysterious and indecipherable series of tests and “Neo-Platonic dialogues.” Apparently successful, these tests had ended the day before when the Englishmen were consecrated as the first bishops in the’ English chapter of the Gnostic Church in a ceremony conducted by Bertiaux in his living room. Some blurry Polaroid snapshots from the occasion showed them all draped in what was described as “$10,000 worth of liturgical robes” and wearing miters similar to what the pope puts on for high mass.

“I thought it was insipid,” one of the Englishmen was saying at the restaurant. He was talking with Bertiaux about a peculiar service they’d just come from a ceremony of the Holy Transfiguration Eastern Orthodox Parish held in the attic of a three-flat on Southport. The head-shop decorations, the cardboard Christ, the little plastic bottles labeled “Holy Water,” and the thick cloud of incense that filled the attic were ridiculous, the Englishman said. “And what about the deacon in cowboy boots and heavy denim.” “It could be worse,” said Bertiaux, who admires the minister of the tiny church, Father Elias, because of his “dedication and sincerity.” Elias recently switched his services to a traditional early morning hour, a move that Bertiaux said was a “sincere” effort to buck “the priorities of the gay community that is, staying in the bars late Saturday night, going to brunch on Sunday, and then, if there’s time, maybe getting around to church in the afternoon.”

“Sincerity” is a recurrent concern for Bertiaux, who is not exactly wild about a lot of the various occult and mystical groups in Chicago. “There has been an explosion of popular interest in the occult,” he said. “But there’s also been an implosion. Ten years ago there were six occult businesses in Chicago. Now there’s only one. Too many of them went in for tacky gimmicks like card readings, and in the end 75 percent of the businesses that failed were simply massage parlors and fronts for prostitution.” With mild scorn, he went on to describe a “pagan cult” that features shaved heads and royal blue garments trimmed with rabbit fur. There are also at least three covens in Chicago, Bertiaux said, and one of them is led by a witch queen called Lady Donna. “We do have a lot of groups who like to run around in long, flowing white robes.”

“Let’s gather our consciousness together,” Bertiaux announced to the table, as he signaled for the check. The new bishops were going back to the apartment, and Bertiaux was heading for the regular Sunday session of the Theosophical Society. He is a vice-president of the organization and often lectures for it as “a public service.”

In the downtown Fine Arts Building, on the same hallway as the Meher Baba Information Center (”Don’t Worry-Be Happy”) and the Jesus Only Youth Society, the “T.S.” room is furnished with a grand piano, an American flag, a couple of dusty cabinets filled with books, and several dozen folding chairs. Last Sunday’s speaker was Dr. Clarence Rodney, a 90-yearold West Indian who runs a place called the Basilica of Divine Wisdom. “He’s mediumistic, clairvoyant, and a psychometrist,” said Bertiaux, smiling at Rodney’s “porn-porn hat” and floor-length gown. Rodney was an impressively eccentric sight, but among the two dozen people in the audience there were several equally distinctive figures.

“That young man at the front with the beard and long hair wearing a T-shirt is the leader of a group that regards him as a Christ figure,” Bertiaux said. “A little Manson-type, a messiah. He used to interrupt meetings here by standing up and saying, `There’s, something powerful happening in the room. Let’s all join hands and meditate.’ Very extreme, but lately he’s toned down, because he’s lost so many of his followers.”

About five minutes into Rodney’s talk on astronauts, angels and ghosts, “weight-lace-ness” and “luminous bodies,” there was a commotion at the back of the room. It was the entrance of an old man in a bright lemon yellow, bowler and a dirty, ruffled shirt. Carrying a shopping bag, he had a cigarette protruding from one of his nostrils: “He’s supposed to be quite wealthy,” Bertiaux whispered, “but very eccentric. An expert on Swedenborg.”

“Where does Theosophy stand on the Second Coming?” the man barked at Rodney. But before the doctor could answer, a blowsy old woman stood up, flashed a girlish smile that exposed a row of ruined teeth, and said to the man with the cigarette in his nose, “Please, can’t we hold our questions to the topic?”

Walking along Michigan Avenue toward his apartment after the meeting, Bertiaux laughed at a description of the Theosophists as “Jesuits on mescaline.” That’s right, he said, “It’s a real trip.” At home Bertiaux slipped off his shoes and disappeared into another room for a quick nap on his “id sofa.” With a terrific view of Lake Michigan, the apartment is a riot of vivid paintings, plants, and mystical paraphernalia. The Englishmen were reading in the living room, and one of them said, “If you nudge Michael a bit, he’ll admit to being a black magician.”

When he returned Bertiaux was nudged. “Yes,” he said, “but black magic is merely a sensational term designed to keep the frivolous away and create barriers. What we’re doing here is the very serious matter of studying metaphysics and the occult, and the way that mathematics weaves these elements together in the invisible, unconscious world behind appearances.” This is not tremendously original, but what distinguishes Bertiaux is his reliance on the images of science fiction and fantasy-especially from the books of H.P. Lovecraft” to try and communicate what things like computers and radar and radioactivity all mean.”

“I’ve had a few flights of astral projection and out-of-body experiences,” Bertiaux said. “It’s fourth dimensional mental activity.” “That’s one of the best descriptions I’ve ever heard,” said one of the Englishmen, as he passed around glasses of Greek wine. Maybe so, but mostly Bertiaux is pretty obscure, especially in discussing the various “psychic machines” scattered around his living room. One is a rectangular box of, polished wood equipped with dials and switches and connected by wires to a series of brightly colored metal panels. It’s attractive in a weird sort of way, and perhaps it does represent the “Bergonsian relationship between technology and spirituality,” but what does it do? Amazing things, according to Bertiaux, but they’re not really explainable in ordinary language. “All forms of art are machines,” is the way he puts it, “within a certain context.”

Bertiaux is very proud of his education - four years under the Jesuits at Seattle University, and graduate work in philosophy at Tulane and the Divinity School of the University of British Columbia - and he gets especially worked up about what he calls “the logic-choppers” of the academic community. “I don’t need an academic position. The important thing is to be a pioneer and to break and smash every intellectual barrier in your way: Like the hotshots from the university theology schools, I lecture on Jung. But I don’t look at the Jungian system from the outside. I live inside it.”

Copyright © John Fleming, 1979

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